New Martin guitar exhibit reveals the history of the famed D-28, revered by country and folk musicians alike

Hank Williams played one. So did Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. John Lennon and Paul McCartney also played them.

Stephen Stills uses one, as does his former bandmate Neil Young, who owns the same one Hank Williams played. He even named it “Hank.”

It is now the instrument of choice for the likes of Dierks Bentley, Brad Paisley and Marcus Mumford.

“It” is the Martin D-28, the “Dreadnought,” the choice of country musicians and folk-rock luminaries, the flat-top wooden acoustic guitar by which all others are judged.

The history of this famed instrument is the subject of a display that recently opened at the Martin Guitar Museum and Visitors Center in Nazareth.

“The Evolution of the D-28” showcases a dozen “Style 28” Martin guitars manufactured since1880 and includes artwork by Robert Goetzl, who has created art for Martin guitars for many years, and many other items that illustrate the news and cultural events that took place at the time the guitars were produced — a TV Guide with Kirk and Spock from “Star Trek” on the cover, a Roosevelt election poster, a picture of Joe DiMaggio.

“Fossilized rock” panels featuring the shapes of guitar braces, bridges and strings, the Martin logo and other familiar shapes form the backdrop of the display, which was crafted by Goetzl to look like an archaeological dig.

While Martin famously has made stringed instruments since 1833, the D-28 didn’t officially come into existence until nearly 100 years later in 1931, though the model’s origins date to 1916 and requests made by a Boston music publisher and an influential Hawaiian musician who spread the sound of his island’s style of guitar play, according to Jason Ahner, C.F. Martin & Co.’s archivist.

Major Kealakai was a musician, composer, teacher and the conductor of the Royal Hawaiian Band. In 1914, he published “The Ukulele and How to Play It.” In 1915, after the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco spawned a Hawaiian music craze across the country, Martin became a leading producer of ukuleles, Ahner says.

In 1916, Kealakai asked the manufacturer to make a larger guitar for him — larger than the company’s biggest OOO-28 model of the time. The model was a half-inch wider, a half-inch longer and deeper, Ahner says.

Not long after, Oliver Ditson and Co., a music publisher and seller of sheet music and instruments, also asked Martin to manufacture a larger guitar that it could sell to its customers exclusively. The guitar that Martin craftsmen built for Kealakai would become the basis of the “Dreadnought” Martin manufactured for Ditson.

The name of the guitar was taken from the most famous seagoing vessel of the times, the HMS Dreadnought of the Royal British Navy, Ahner says. The Dreadnought, which means “fear nothing,” spawned a new class of battleships around the world and was the most advanced warship of its time. In 1915 during World War I, it became the first — and still the only — battleship known to have sunk a submarine when it rammed Germany’s U-29 just north of Scotland.

“If you were on that ship, you wouldn’t fear anything else and if you were playing that guitar you wouldn’t fear not being heard over a banjo or another instrument,” Ahner says.

Like its namesake battleship, the Martin Dreadnought guitar was wider, longer and deeper than others of its kind.

“It was a larger body. It would give you more volume and more bass response. They actually referred to it as a bass guitar just because of how much bass it gave,” Ahner says.

Martin produced the Dreadnought exclusively for Ditson and Co. for 15 years before the music store and publisher went out of business in 1931.

“Martin had to decide what they wanted to do with this larger guitar,” Ahner says. “They first started building it under their name as the D-1 and the D-2 in 1931, and a little later in the year they changed the model designation to the D-18 and the D-28.”

While the “D” in the name stands for “Dreadnought,” the numbers were references to the style and appointment level. The higher number meant finer materials — a rosewood top and sides — and more intricate decorative inlays on the fingerboard, herringbone trim and fancier binding materials, like ivaroid instead of boltaron, both plastics, but one meant to look like ivory.

“Style 28 guitars go back to before the Civil War,” Ahner says. “Those numbers, like a D-28 or a single O-28 represent: The first is the size, and the second was what we consider now the appointment level, but back then it was the wholesale price.

“If you purchased in 1862, the first single O-28 appears in company records. So if you purchased that guitar back then, it would have cost $28. But instead of the next time they had a price increase, instead of changing those numbers again, they just stuck with 28.”

That is one reason why the exhibit includes two Style 28 guitars that predate the Dreadnought: an O-28 manufactured in 1880 and a OOO-28 manufactured in 1914. Interestingly, as the display shows, the guitar made in 1914 cost $15 less when it was new than the one made 34 years earlier.

Why, Ahner says, is the question he has most often been asked since the display opened. The reason is that the Martin guitar factory electrified its manufacturing process in 1912, making guitar production faster and more efficient than it had been in 1880 when everything was done exclusively by hand.

Since it first appeared on the market under the Martin name, the D-28 has undergone many design changes that are reflected in the display.

The first and perhaps the most significant came in 1934 when the length of the fretboard was increased from 12 to 14 frets — a design change that was accompanied with a shortening of the body, Ahner says. The changes put the guitar’s sound in a higher register and also gave it more range.

“That’s when all of the early country musicians and bluegrass musicians started buying these guitars and using them on stage,” Ahner says. “It gave it a little less bass response than the 12-fret. I think a lot of the musicians around that time thought it matched their voice really well.”

It was thanks to that change, Ahner says, that the D-28 became the instrument of choice for soon-to-be country stars Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb, early singing cowboys Tex Fletcher and Cowboy Slim Rinehart and bluegrass musician Lester Flatt.

Many other changes followed in fairly quick succession. In 1938, the bracing was moved farther back from the sound hole. In 1939, the width of the nut — the piece at the end of the fretboard that controls the strings’ spacing, distance from the edge of the fingerboard and their height above the first fret — was narrowed to what is now considered an industry standard 1 11/16 of an inch.

In 1944, in deference to America’s effort in World War II, Martin reduced production time by eliminating the scalloping on the guitar’s bracings, Ahner says.

But since 1966 — when the color of the pick guard was changed from tortoise to black — there were few significant changes until last year, when Martin decided it was time to reimagine the Dreadnought.

“The guitar market is constantly changing, so what might have been the perfect guitar in 1966 might not be the perfect guitar today,” Ahner says.

The changes to the newest D-28s include a narrower, tapered neck the company took from the “Performing Artists” series of guitars Martin launched in 2010, Ahner says. The model also features more forward bracing, antique white binding, the return of open-gear tuning and a toner finish that gives the guitar the look of an instrument that has aged 20 or 30 years, he adds.

It was these changes that inspired the exhibit.

“There are so many musicians that played a D-28, that D-28 for a lot of artists is the quintessential guitar to have,” Ahner says.

Daryl Nerl is a freelance writer.

DETAILS

‘Evolution of the D-28’

What: New exhibit that explores the history of Martin’s famed D-28 acoustic guitar, an instrument of choice for early country stars and folk-rock musicians of the 1960s.

When: Through 2018

Where: Martin Guitar Museum & Visitors Center, 501 Sycamore St., Nazareth

How much: Free, donations accepted

Museum hours: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday. Martin also conducts tours of its production factory 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. weekdays.

Info: 610-759-2837, martinguitar.com

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