JooDee solved...Do You Have An Elk?

Had a message from a guy out on the west coast who's a collector of JooDee guitars.  He shared with me that he nailed down the company of origin for these beauties:  Dyna Gakki.  Which was one of the companies cited in many JooDee discussions!  He said he got the information from a former Dyna executive in Japan.  So I feel confident that we can say Dyna is the maker of the JooDee badge.  Whew.  Only god-knows-how many more badges to go....

Read some interesting things on the Elk badge too, from Vintage Guitar magazine.  I had it in the wrong place, as there was an Elk Gakki in Japan!   From the pics, these were pretty cool looking guitars.  Finding a clear acrylic Elk was fascinating as well.  Does anyone remember a major rock star of the 1970's who played a clear acrylic guitar?  If there was one, I don't recall it.  Anyway, Elk seems to be a pretty scarce badge.  Have you seen one?  Own one?  Did Elk Gakki make anything else? 

So many questions....I may have to learn Japanese.

Need to thank a couple of shredders, Yoshi guitars?

I still haven't heard from anyone about JooDee guitars....but I keep hoping.  I have heard from a couple of resident experts on guitar badges "Feather" and  "Crown".  Thank you for your input!!!  I also have found a new guitar that needs researching...Yoshi.  Sounds like an old anime character. 

If you checked out the page lately, you'll notice the table is gone.  I decided to hide it as I was making so many changes to the original list that I felt it was only adding to the confusion for people reading my written listing.  I'll put it back up when I've made more corrections.  Corrections ARE going very well, thanks to several helping hands and a few new places to do research!  I'm even more hopeful that we'll have a good list within a year or two instead of the decade I was anticipating!  So thank you once again! 

Keep those questions and comments coming!

Starting the blog...calling all shredders!!!!

As just a simple country person with little to no musical ability who has never owned a guitar or played in a band, it probably strikes you odd that I'd have an interest in vintage guitars.  But in doing research on various obscure badged guitars for friends of mine, I found something endlessly fascinating as an amateur historian and internet geek!  Much of what is known about this topic comes from enthusiasts only. To my knowledge other than the occasional article in a vintage guitar mag or paragraph in a vintage guitar collectors' book no one ever addresses the missing information in sum.  It is something that needs to be tracked down and recorded.  To do that, I need all you shredders and threshers out there to help me!

So I started this blog in a five year mission....no, that's Star Trek.... to gather all the bits of information out there on obscure, branded or badged guitars...to try to go back in time, find out who made them and why, and hopefully provide badly needed information to the folks out there who play and own these things and just love 'em to death!

This week I gathered what I know so far from the 1960's-1980's era, which I posted on Hubpages under the title Japanese Manufacturers of Made In Japan Badged Electric Guitars from 1960 to 1980.  This was a period where Japanese firms made hundreds of badged, low priced guitars that were modeled on the more expensive great American guitars during the height of electric guitarsmanship.  Kids everywhere wanted to play like Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, so they got their parents or saved their money to buy Les Paul or Rickenbacker copies made in Japan or Korea for the American market. 

American manufacturers like Aria and Ibanez gave contracts to Japanese companies to produce products that were copies of famous Fender and Gibson guitar designs, reproducing them into cheaper versions with cool sounding names like Raven, Shadow and Vox.  These were transported and sold right here on main street, sold by the thousands...until Fender and Gibson sued for copyright infringement to stop their flooding the American market with copies.

The odd thing is, some of these cheap 'copies' are highly sought-after collectibles that guitarists LOVE to play! 

So let's begin the investigation, my soulful friends, and figure out....WHO MADE MY VINTAGE GUITAR!