This is the Gibson Jumbo. It was built in 1934 and is one of the very first slope shouldered dreadnoughts. It was radical at the time. Take a look at a Gibson L-3 from 1924 - the Loar era. This was Gibson’s basic design for the day. The size, volume & projection was designed to compete with the Martin flat-tops of the time.
Over a little more than a 10 year period, everything changed. World War 1 ended in 1918 and was followed by the Roaring Twenties and the broad expansion of Jazz. Mandolins and banjos were drifting slowly out of fashion. The Crash of 1929 brought the Great Depression, which reached pretty much every household by 1933. Then this guy appeared in 1934.
First, a small sidebar about Martin:
Martin built guitars for other companies; even producing some radical designs that were a bit too much for carrying the ‘Martin’ name. They were, after all, a traditional company and slow to change with the times. In 1916, the large music distribution & retail company “Oliver Ditson” wanted a bigger guitar for a market that they believed wanted louder and stronger instruments. They convinced Martin to build a massive steel string flat-top, bigger than anything Martin had tried before. To give it an appropriate name, they called it a “Dreadnaught” after the 1906 Battleship HMS Dreadnaught - the largest warship ever built at the time.
The first ones they tried had fan bracing which just couldn’t handle the tension of steel strings. So they helped develop an ‘X’ bracing pattern that could. The big guitar sold well for Ditson - well enough that Martin took notice and developed their own version. The first Dreadnaught to carry the C.F. Martin name arrived in 1931. The first 2 models were the D-1 (mahogany) & D-2 (rosewood).
Gibson was not about to be out-done. Even though the Depression was suppressing the retail guitar market, Gibson introduced the new Jumbo in 1934. The name “Jumbo” was familiar as the famous elephant of the Barnum & Bailey Circus whose shoulders stood 13 feet high. He was also one of the 21 elephants that crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to help assure the public that the bridge was safe.
The Gibson Jumbo Guitar had a sunburst finish, a 4 1⁄2" deep, 16" body, 14 frets clear of the body, with a fixed pin bridge and a compensating saddle. It was made of mahogany, with a spruce top and rosewood fingerboard. The soundboard is almost the exact same area as the Martin, but its shoulders did not meet the neck at 90 degrees like the Martin - gaining the Gibson a description of a ’soft-shouldered’ dreadnaught.
The Jumbo was only in production from 1934 to 1936 when the Advanced Jumbo & the Jumbo 35 were both introduced. The Jumbo 35 was the lower-priced model, going for about $35. The Advanced Jumbo was about $80, but still less than the $100 Martin D-28 Dreadnought of the day.
The Jumbo 35 was replaced by the J-45 in August of 1942. The J is for ‘Jumbo’ - more or less as we know it today. On the fancier end, to satisfy the needs of the Singing Cowboys on the Silver Screen, the J-200 was conceived in 1937. It was then renamed the Super Jumbo (SJ) in 1938 and released at a very high price. This was, of course followed by a similar but slightly less fancy J-100 introduced in 1939.
This was a lot of change in a relatively short period of time - and it all started with this: the sparely decorated Jumbo.
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