A few years later I ended up buying the two double neck Sho-Buds and all six keyless guitars when I was in my Goodlettsville store. Hal took it straight to the Opry and played it several times before David called him and told him he’d built a couple more and wanted Hal to try them out.ĭavid ended up building six keyless guitars in all, but none of them were ever actually sold to any customers outside of Nashville. Hal and myself went into the factory to check this unit out. The guitar raised at the right end by the pickup and lowered strings from the other end which was normally the keyhead end. Hal played the black one for awhile and claimed to really love it, but ended up going back to the brown one and using it until many people started ordering identical guitars from Sho-Bud.Īt this time, David Jackson called Hal and told him to bring the guitars back to the store because too many people were asking for steel guitars like this but the factory wasn’t building them.īesides, David had an idea for a revolutionary new guitar that had a changer at both ends of the guitar. So he went back to David at Sho-Bud and said, “Let’s build one just like it but put some beautiful black shiny mica on it instead of the brown.” Six months later it was done. It sounded wonderful on the Opry, but Hal took a lot of verbal abuse because of the strange looking brown mica on the guitar. The next time I saw this guitar, I was playing the Opry with Billy Walker and Hal had the guitar there and was using it with acts that he was backing up. We’re building it to be a better sounding guitar and we’re just experimenting with brown mica and aluminum necks. I made the comment to David that I was sure he could find some nicer looking formica to put on the guitar than that ridiculous brown simulated birdseye that he had.ĭavid’s reply was, “We’re not building this guitar to look good. I remember hanging around the factory when this guitar was going together. The first guitar that was built by and for Hal to try to accomplish this feat was a brown double ten with eight pedals and four knee levers.
So he and David decided to build some experimental guitars that similar building processes that the Emmons company was using, one of which was the aluminum neck, something that Sho-Bud had never done up until this time. Hal and David Jackson, who was the main driving force behind this company, were in close cahoots and shared many ideas on some very interesting approaches to building steel guitars.Ībout the time that many of the players were switching over to Emmons guitars, Hal thought that there was no reason to do this if the right model Sho-Bud could be designed and built. He was the right person to do this kind of experimenting because he worked the Opry as a staff player and did many recording sessions throughout the week. The Sho-Bud company located at 416 Broadway in downtown Nashville with satellite factories on the north and south side of town were great places for Hal to experiment. Hal was a very competitive steel player in Nashville and was always on a quest to have a better guitar, which included searching high and low, finding something great and trying to improve on it. One interesting player in Nashville that has left us now was the great Hal Rugg. I started a couple weeks ago doing the history of some of the players of steel guitar.