A parlor guitar is a compact and narrow-waisted instrument, generally smaller than Martin’s single 0 size. The name comes from the rooms in which the guitar was typically played in the late 19th century. Today, parlor guitars are finding renewed interest among a broad spectrum of players, both professionals and those looking for small, lightweight instruments to take to beach parties or campfire singalongs. In this
In 2013, in the zero-gravity atmosphere of outer space, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield made history when he reached for a floating Larrivée parlor guitar to perform the early David Bowie hit “Space Oddity” for a video clip captured live from the International Space Station. The video went viral—and Larrivée got the best publicity the solar system had ever seen.
Back on Earth, interest in small-bodied parlor guitars—precursors to the bulky modern dreadnought—skyrocketed. At the 2015 Winter NAMM music retailers convention in Anaheim, California, a steady stream of curious guitarists strolled past the Santa Cruz Guitar Co.’s impressive line of stalwart dreadnoughts to ogle a diminutive PJ model tucked away into a crook in the manufacturer’s exhibit booth.
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“The smallest guitar that we make today was one of the biggest guitars available up until about 1870, ” Santa Cruz owner Richard Hoover says. “The only reason they didn’t make larger guitars [in the old days] is that they didn’t need to. More volume wasn’t an issue until people started competing with other instruments in ensembles, or with barking dogs and banjos in vaudeville.”
Hoover says that today, advances in amplification and recording have rendered larger guitars less essential, resulting in the current parlor guitar craze. “In the early 1980s, interest in smaller instruments began a steady incline because people realized they didn’t need the volume of the dreadnought, ” Hoover says. “In 1985, probably 70 percent of our guitars were dreadnoughts. Today, the majority of the instruments we make are OM, 00 size, or smaller, as more people appreciate the quality of the volume over the quantity.”
Santa Cruz isn’t the only company experiencing growth in its sales of small-bodied instruments. In 2013, Gretsch added the low-cost G9515 Jim Dandy Flat Top model to its Roots Collection and parlor guitars were in evidence everywhere on the exhibit floor at the 2013 NAMM music-trade show in Anaheim, California.
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The growing list of other companies that have added parlor guitars to their product lines—including well-crafted instruments at affordable prices—is a testament to the popularity of this model. Those include Alvarez, Aria, Beddell, Breedlove, Blueridge, Cordoba, Godin, Hohner, Fender, Grace Harbor, Ibanez, the Loar, Lowden, Luna, Martin, RainSong, Recording King, Simon & Patrick, Taylor, Tanglewood, and Seagull, to name a few.
Meanwhile, parlor guitars are finding renewed interest among a broad spectrum of players, both professionals and those looking for small, lightweight instruments to take to beach parties or campfire singalongs. “The parlor guitar is light, easy and fun to bring on trips, ” says Dom Flemons, formerly of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. “It’s a wonderful social instrument to have around for gatherings, vacations, and picnics. Everyone usually knows at least one song on the guitar, so it’s really nice to have a parlor to pass between a bunch of friends.”
Dom Flemons plays a custom guitar made by Todd Cambio of Fraulini Guitars. It’s got a “medium sized parlor body with a dreadnought parlor neck.”
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In the modern era, parlor guitars are perhaps most closely associated with folk singers, including Joan Baez and a young Bob Dylan, as well as earlier bluesmen such as Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson. “I love to play the old styles on a parlor guitar, ” says Flemons, who played a parlor on his recent solo debut
. “I use a medium-size parlor—a Fraulini Loretta. It has a punchy sound while still having a delicate tone; it has a great response for both fingerpicking and for using a thumb pick and the fingers.”
Even in bluegrass, a genre in which most guitarists prefer big dreadnoughts, some players favor small guitars. “Jody Stecher played bluegrass on a 1-sized Martin for years, travelled all over the place with it in its original coffin case, and it just sounded incredible, ” says Eric Schoenberg, vintage-guitar expert and proprietor of the eponymous store in Tiburon, California, on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. “I sold Ronnie Earl, the [former] Roomful of Blues guitarist, one of those really early Martins—an interesting thing I’ve found is that electric blues players have just flipped over these things on a number of occasions.”
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One of the most notable high-profile players of the parlor guitar is Mark Orton, who uses the instrument for his work in wide-reaching chamber ensembles, including Tin Hat (formerly the Tin Hat Trio), as well as in films, dance, and theater. Orton’s signature sound—the one that resulted in his being asked to score movies such as the Oscar-nominated
—is made possible by virtue of his using a parlor instrument. “My main guitar is a Martin 1-21 from 1893 that I’ve had for years, ” says Orton, who also plays a 1913 Martin 2-17. “It’s my pride and joy, my second wife. It’s very comfortable to play, even easier than my Telecaster. It weighs next to nothing; you could practically push a pencil tip through the face of the thing.
“It’s so incredibly responsive, ” Orton adds. “It takes very little force to get great bass out of the guitar, and it works great for switching between pick and fingerstyle. I have a D-18 as well, but that guitar can get muddy-sounding, especially for doing stuff with more dissonance and with smaller intervals—quicker fingerstyle patterns also really benefit from the clarity of the smaller guitar.”
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Orton uses steel strings on his 1-21, but to make it work he had the bridge reinforced, and he uses very light strings—basically a gauge-ten set in which the first string is replaced with an 11. He tunes everything down by a whole step (low to high) D G C F A D. “A collector would cringe to see the things that have been done to stabilize the bridge, but I play this guitar every day of my life and will never sell it, so I don’t care, ” he says.
With their distinctively narrow bodies and short scale lengths, parlor guitars are the smallest of all six-string flattop acoustics—as much as three inches shorter than the modern standard of 25.4 inches. Often seen as a bridge between the traditional Spanish nylon-string guitar and the modern steel-string, parlor guitars served a specific function when they appeared in the United States in the late 1800s. They were originally built for women’s more compact frames, and they were named for their use as instruments intended to entertain guests in homes rich enough to include parlors.
In the mid-19th century, design distinctions between European and American guitars were minimal—both were compact by today’s standards, and built delicately to accommodate the comparatively weak gut strings. Near the end of the century, as European guitars became increasingly larger, some American companies, including Martin, continued building small guitar bodies while experimenting with structural elements—for example, X-bracing in place of the traditional Spanish fan—that would give them a heartier sound.
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Popularity of parlor guitars waned by the early part of the 20th century when guitar makers began designing larger-body sizes structurally reinforced to handle the tension of steel strings. After Martin introduced the bigger dreadnought in 1931, to compete with other bluegrass instruments, parlor guitar sales began to wane. Today, thanks to modern sound reinforcement and recording technology, getting volume from a small instrument is no longer a big concern. And in the past decade, as guitarists have become more drawn to old music and vintage instruments, fascination with parlor guitars is on the rise. Guitar companies have rolled out new models across the spectrum of affordability—from high-end Martins to budget Washburns—for contemporary players drawn to the look and feel of the little instruments.
Grace Teague, of Grace Harbor Guitars, agrees that one reason there’s an increase in interest in parlor guitars today is that the small bodies are friendlier to women than jumbos and dreadnoughts. “Anything we can do to encourage women to play guitars is a good thing, ” she says, adding that a parlor model was a natural for the new line just launched by distributor Dana B. Goods.
Companies large and small now include new parlor guitars in their product lines—instruments without the problems of playability inherent to 100-year-old guitars. In some instances, the rise of parlors has come from a demand for detailed recreations of golden-era instruments from before World War II. In the 1990s, Martin, for example, began revisiting small-bodied guitars with period details such as tapered slotted headstocks.
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“Years ago, I asked Martin’s Custom Shop if they could build a 000-42 exactly like a 1930s model, but they didn’t have the fixtures, so they turned my order down, ” says Martin historian Dick Boak. “Then, in the mid-’90s, I worked at the estate of Jimmie Rodgers and got to know his historic 1927 000-45. Martin finally retooled its fixtures to create a replica
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