Premier Guitars

I am going to attempt to piece together an approximate chronology of Premier guitars, with a particular focus on the scroll body models. This is based primarily on photos of guitars found online, guitar stories Vol 1 by Michael Wright and a small handful of catalogs and adverts that I have seen, so consequently will be incomplete and wrong in places, but it is a start and I hope it will get more accurate as others contribute what they know.

The basic history is written in various places online so I will sum it up very briefly. Premier was the premium line of the Sorkin Music Company, who were a New York based distributor and wholesaler from sometime in the 40s till sometime in the 70s. Sorkin imported guitars from many companies, but also retailed guitars under their own brands of Premier, Marvel, Strad-O-Lin, Royce and Beltone (and probably some others). The name Sorkin rarely appeared on any of these instruments, instead they used the name Multivox - usually on the metal serial number plate that later became a sticker.

My dating is based predominantly on the serial numbers. The serial numbers are probably not exactly sequential, but seem to follow the feature changes reasonably closely, so can be used as a way to approximately date guitars - particularly against instruments that have been accurately dated by their pot codes. The serial numbers seem to have been originally restricted to the Premier line but at some point they started giving Multivox serial numbers to Marvel and Strad-o-Lin guitars at least. These serial numbers were seperate from the amp line, but were shared across all the guitar lines (archtops, solidbodies, flattops, basses and I would guess the lapsteels as well but I haven't actually seen one).

The serial numbers I have seen range from 1000-6000ish so this would give a total production of around 5000 instruments from 195(4?) to 197(0?). By comparison Fender were apparently making 1500 instruments a week by 1964. It's likely that many of these 5000 have probably been destroyed, particularly the early guitars. They often suffered from binding rot (a common problem on New York built guitars this era - Gretsch, Guild, Epiphone etc), which will have prompted people to trash them. They also often had desirable parts (bigsbys, dearmond pickups, gibson made TOM bridges etc) so many have been parted out.

I believe that the numbering started with 1000 but that these were not the first instruments (It seems logical that the serial numbers started when Premier were first in the Sorkin catalog), but very few of these pre-serial number instruments were built. The highest I have documented is 6158.

The first guitars offered under the Premier name were probably archtops built by the United Guitar Company based in New Jersey. They were based on standard designs that United offered, as the same body styles appear under many brands (mostly seen under the Orpherum or Stewart name, which were owned by Sorkin's rival, Maurice Lipsky), including D'Angelico who used them for some of his electric guitars. United were founded in 1939 by John Carner, who bought the guitar building division from Oscar Schmidt in 1935. They seem to have started to build high quality archtops when Frank Forcillo (who was an apprentice to John D'Angelico) joined the company, so it is likely that he designed them.

The scroll guitars were built by Sorkin in the Multivox factory by builders from the Homenick Brother's factory, which Sorkin bought in the early 50s (before 1956). They started to source them offshore around 1964, with bodies coming from Italy and electronics from Japan with a mixture of European and Japanese hardware.

They possibly continued building the necks for the guitars in New York but there isn't really a way to verify this. The only evidence is guitars were still marked Made in USA till quite late in the run (though this may have just been a lie) and there were differences in necks that were definitely built in Europe. The earliest celluloid body guitars have the same string tension bar that the earlier guitars used, so I think the necks for these were likely made in New York. 

 The very last scroll guitars were Made in Holland (possibly still with the Italian bodies) by Egmond and these had adjustable truss rods which the earlier necks do not. There were some Italian built scroll guitars branded Monza but I suspect these were factory door specials and not authorised by Sorkin. The necks are similar to but not the same as the ones used on Premiers (they have a zero fret and don't have the double dot pattern), which suggests that they weren't sourcing the necks in Italy.

When the last guitars were built I have no idea, but they were still catalogued (offset scrolls and Bantams) in 1970. They were gone by 1976, replaced by Japanese built Gibson and Fender knockoffs. There were Premier branded guitars built into the 90s, but their original designs probably didn't make it far into the 70s.