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These pages are a history of the Mosrite company. All of this has come about due to my "obsession" with these great guitars. Please enjoy. The beginning The Mosrite company was started around 1952 by Semie Moseley with the financial help of a friend, Rev. Ray Boatwright, who bought Semie his first woodworking tools around this time. He used the first part of his name and the last part of his friends to make the company name that would become part of music history. Semie started doing customizing work while working for Paul Bigsby,
around 1952-54. These included Joe Maphis' Super 400, Larry Collins
Gibson ES-140, and several others. Once Paul and Semie parted ways,
he established "Mosrite," where along with custom made
guitars like the Maphis double neck he also did dozens of customizing
jobs on country western singers' guitars, including re-necked acoustics
for Little Jimmy Dickens, Lorrie Collins, Skeets McDonald, Johnny
Bond, and many many others. This customizing work was actually his
bread and butter for about five years, as it was a steady income
and he could work on it alongside his custom guitars.
These early guitars he built included this double neck (see pic
above right) for Joe " king of the strings " Maphis. "It
was a beautiful instrument" said Gene Moles, a session musician
from Bakersfield and a member of Jimmy Thompson's TV band, and assembly
line inspector for Mosrite guitars. This double neck was one of
the slightly bulkier designs as also used by Larry Collins who's
double neck was finished in 1955, unlike the smoother double necks
(see pics below) made later in the 50's and early 60's for people
like Brian Lonbeck
There were probably only about 15 of the original big-bodied, full gingerbread doublenecks ever made along with five or six triple necks, there were a lot of doublenecks made in the period 1959 to 1966, all custom ordered, most based on the Joe Maphis design but with varying degrees of "gingerbread" appointments.
This is one of the Joe Maphis models from around 1962 with bound body and set neck. As you can see the guitar is close to the early "production" Ventures model but with a few small exceptions. The symmetrical headstock says "Joe Maphis model by Mosrite of California" as the Ventures hadn't become involved with Mosrite yet. This guitar also has what was to become known as the "mistake plate" around the vibrato. Semie had set the neck too shallow and needed to recess the unit into the body, necessitating a plate to hide the mistake. Semie had built around 25 of these guitars in 1962 and '63 and lent one to Nokie Edwards of the Ventures to use on some recording sessions. This was to change everything! Nokie bought a guitar off Semie and within a year the distribution deal with the Ventures would make Mosrite a household name, at least in the surf/instrumental guitar world. It was probably Nokie who made the Mosrite name famous. Nokie was the lead guitarist for the Ventures, an instrumental group and by late 1963 the entire band was playing Mosrites on songs like "Walk don't run" and the theme from "Hawaii 5-O". On the back of one of their albums they had "Guitars courtesy of Mosrite Distributing Corporation". That was enough to start the ball rolling and soon they had orders from dealers. This was the start of Mosrite's heyday. Initially building 20 or 30 guitars a month, the orders kept coming in and eventually Mosrite was well on the way to being a credible American guitar manufacturer. At the peak of production in 1968, Semie, his brother Andy and their crew of approx. 107 employees were making about 1000 guitars a month - acoustics, standard electrics, double necks, triple necks, basses, effects pedals, amplifiers, even Dobros (which Mosrite bought in 1966) and Melobar slide guitars which Semie was making for the Melobar company. Of course the Ventures model was the flagship of the company and bought in the most orders. These are probably the guitars that Mosrite are best remembered for. page 1 - page 2 - page 3 - page 4 - page 5 - page 6 - page 7 |
