The traditional songs were so effective in delivering messages in very human terms that new singer-songwriters began to pop up with songs of current issues: the Vietnam conflict, nuclear proliferation, unionization, corruption, greed, blind conformity, social injustice, pollution, etc. The songs were there and ready to be delivered to the public by anyone with a guitar and voice. There were songs from Southern prisons, sharecroppers, immigrant laborers, miners, Black work songs, union organizing songs, traditional songs, new songs, songs of heartache, heroism and defeat. The remarkable recordings filed with the Library of Congress by the Lomax family demonstrated that the human condition is common to all people, from all backgrounds and all walks of life. The songs and recordings gave a voice to people who were otherwise lost to American society – they were too obscure, downtrodden, ignored or forgotten.

The recordings they made around the country offered a window into the hearts and minds of musicians from all walks of life. There were hundreds of traditional songs and tunes that had been made available by the Lomax family. All that was needed was a guitar, a good tune and a creative thought. You didn’t need a Big Band, an auditorium or a record company to be relevant. It was music of the common folk – Folk Music. The blues, sharecropper work songs, union songs, immigrant songs and all manner of stories and tales that articulated our everyday lives. The songs and the message were firmly in the tradition of Woody Guthrie and the common folk of the American landscape. The Limelighters, the Weavers, the Kingston Trio and other vocal groups built their sound around traditional stringed instruments: guitar, banjo and bass. The folk boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s helped create a tremendous demand for acoustic guitars. I hope that you will find this article to be interesting. Below is a history, or as much as I can find about the Elger Guitar Company. Most of what you can learn about the Elger Guitar Company is, predominantly, a build-up towards it’s final reincarnation, as the Ibanez Guitars Company but I would like to tell you something about the smaller, now defunct company, ELGER Guitars. That being said, the Elger Guitar Company produced some very nice hand made guitars in its American form and even after it got taken over by a big Japanese mass producer in the 1970’s.

In many ways, the history of the Elger Guitar Company is representative of the story of many small, independent, guitar manufacturers that started up and eventually disappeared from the scene due to being bought out by bigger companies for various reasons. The instrument had seen its better days and was in need of some repair and it’s finish is badly blemished but it played very nicely and I am now the proud owner of a guitar that bears my name upon it’s head-stock. To make a long story short in the Spring of 2017 I eventually managed to acquire a sample of this brand of guitars, a Japanese version I admit, and I was rather pleased with it’s sound quality. To say the least, being that I am a bit of an oddball guitar collector, I was quite intrigued by this news and immediately wondered if there was any way I could ever own one of these instruments. On top of the fact that its name and mine were the same, there was the coincidence that I happened to own a guitar of the brand name that Elger Guitars would eventually become, ( Ibanez). Now I was quite amazed by this, firstly because Elger is not all that common a name, secondly because my name is Elger due to a complete accident and thirdly because the company in question arrived at it’s name in a completely arbitrary fashion. There was, or had been, a guitar manufacturer out there that shared it’s name with mine. In 2008 while doing a Google search for my name on the web, (Oh come on! You’ve done that kind of thing haven’t you?), I stumbled onto a curious fact that I had been completely unaware of.

Teisco guitar history