Made in Port Townsend: Resonator guitars

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It's not just woodworkers turning out gorgeous instruments in Port Townsend and Jefferson County. Tucked away in a corner of town is a machine shop, sheet metal shop and wood shop where John Morton makes resonator guitars. He has made about 120 instruments, including ukuleles, mandolins and lap guitars.

Morton worked as a machinist at the University of California at Berkeley for 23 years, and he's also a lifelong musician. "That kind of converged on craft plus music," he said, when in the early 1990s, a friend asked him to repair a National guitar.

"I got to see what the insides looked like," he said.

Morton is interested in the 1920s, an era he calls "the apex of mechanical invention."

"It was an era when everybody was devising new gizmos and ways of doing things, National included."

Steel resonator guitars were invented by John Dopyera of the National String Instrument Corp. in the 1920s. The design uses a metal cone for mechanical, not electrical, amplification of sound, "like the cone on an old Victrola's amplification."

The sound is colored by the body material, the size and shape of the body cavity, and the diameter of the cones, which look a bit like flattish hubcaps.

Metal instruments are "not usually for the casual player," Morton said, and are not usually a person's first instrument. "They sustain so long, the notes you've already played get in the way ... people who play them use that very cunningly."

Steel single-cone guitars are associated with the great blues players of the 1920s, with a "spooky, nasal sound."

Hawai‘ian steel-guitar music was "huge in the '20s and '30s, it went all over the world," said Morton, "was played behind Louie Armstrong and Jimmy Roberts. That sound was really hip at the time." Hawai‘ian steel guitar was played lap-style on tri-cone guitars. "They have a different sound, a very sweet, sustaining sound [that] just lasts forever," he said, and added "I'm just interested in popular music history."

Morton especially likes music of the 1920s, particularly French and South American, and plays clarinet with the Blue Crows, performing vintage jazz tunes with George Rezendes, who plays a Morton-built steel guitar, and Fred Nussbaum. Morton played fiddle in the '70s, "noodles on the accordion," and attends the annual National Oldtime Fiddlers Contest and Festival in Weiser, Idaho.

"The '20s were an era before blues were really defined as they are now," Morton said. Different genres like blues, jazz and ragtime were not separated and specialized until later. He described different regional specialties. The Piedmont blues, jolly dance music, is "the farthest thing" from Muddy Waters or a Chicago player, or a New York piano player or New Orleans wind instruments.

SHOP TALK

Morton has a machine shop, wood shop and sheet metal shop with enormous machines, some with large control panels.

"There's a world of little gadgets in here," he said.

There's a computer-controlled milling machine, a brake, sheer and press for making dies. He shows a punch-and-die set that makes shapes on the bodies of the guitars, and other sets used for making the rim that the pinwheel-shaped cover plate sits in.

To make a cone, he cuts a flat round with scissors, and using a process called "spinning" on a metal lathe, he trowels the disk down, pressing it as it spins on a Bakelite spinning chuck that's been turned to the right dimensions.

Morton noted that most people who want to make resonator guitars have to buy the tray, the cone, and the part that sits on top, but he can make his own, to his own design.

"Almost nobody else does this," he said. "There's very little competition."

He moved to Port Townsend in 2005 because of the music.

His instruments are sold at Crossroads Music in Port Townsend. Casey McGill of Seattle plays one of Morton's guitars and a six-string tenor ukulele. "[McGill] is teaching at [Centrum's] Ukulele Festival," Morton said. "He's a first-rate entertainer."

He doesn't build to order, and he mostly fends off commissions, he doesn't modify his designs to suit people.

"I design them and make them, and if someone wants them," he'll sell them. "I've never advertised them and I don't want any more notoriety than I already have."