A guitar developed in the late 1920s with one or more resonator discs, usually metal, mounted inside the body and connected to the bridge. It was developed in the USA by John Dopyera (b June 1893), the son of a Czech violin maker, and first manufactured by the National String Instrument Corp. (formed by Dopyera and others) in Los Angeles from 1927. Dopyera left the company in about 1929 and set up the Dobro Corp. with two of his brothers, Emil (‘Ed’) and Rudolph (‘Rudy’). The brand name ‘Dobro’, derived from the first syllables of ‘Dopyera brothers’, was devised at this time (it is also the word for ‘good’ in Slavonic languages). Besides resonator guitars, the company marketed resonator ukuleles, banjos, mandolins, four-string tenor guitars, and double basses, and in the early 1930s produced one of the first Spanish electric guitars, which had magnetic pickups designed by Victor Smith.
Around 1933 changes in the management of the National String Instrument Corp. left another Dopyera brother, Louis, as the major stockholder, and a merger with the Dobro Corp. followed in 1935. The National Dobro Corp. moved to Chicago in 1936, and in the late 1930s added Hawaiian steel guitars and electric violins to its range of string instruments. It produced variants of the resonator guitar for marketing under different names by distributors, and exchanged guitar bodies for metal and electrical parts with other companies. In 1937 the Chicago-based Regal company acquired rights to manufacture Dobro instruments. In the early 1940s National-Dobro became the Valco Manufacturing Co. (named after Victor Smith, Al Frost and Louis Dopyera), which, after the war, concentrated on the making of electric guitars primarily with National or Supro brands until its demise in 1968. Following a revival of interest in the resonator guitar in the late 1950s, Emil Dopyera began to manufacture the instrument again around 1959 in El Monte, Los Angeles (later in nearby Gardena). His company was sold to Mosrite around 1967, but the name ‘Dobro’ was regained by Emil jr and Ruby Dopyera when their Original Musical Instrument Co. (OMI) resumed the making of resonator guitars in Long Beach, California in 1971, moving to nearby Huntington Beach in 1972. In the 1990s OMI was bought by Gibson.
The resonator guitar was originally developed in response to the growing demand for a guitar that could produce a greater volume than the conventional instrument. It was superseded in many areas of popular music after World War II by the more efficient electric guitar. The resonator guitar was used at first in country blues and hillbilly music; it was often played Hawaiian-style across the knees and with a bottleneck (indeed some models specifically adapted for Hawaiian playing were marketed); it is now heard mainly in bluegrass and related country music, though it is also played by some rock musicians.
M. Brooks: ‘The Story of the Dobro [as told] by Ed Dopera’, Guitar Player, v/8 (1971), 29–31, 39–40, 49 only; repr. in The Guitar Player Book, ed. J. Ferguson (Saratoga, CA, 1978, 3/1983), 361–4
T. Wheeler: The Guitar Book: a Handbook for Electric and Acoustic Guitarists (New York, 1974, 2/1978), 38
T. Wheeler: American Guitars: an Illustrated History (New York, 1982/R), 247, 286–317
B. Brozman: The History and Artistry of National Resonator Instruments (Fullerton, CA, 1993)
S. Chinery and T. Bacon: The Chinery Collection: 150 Years of American Guitars (London, 1996)
HUGH DAVIES/TONY BACON