1969 Barclay Acoustic Guitar

 

Here we have a 1969 Barclay guitar.  These were made by Harmony and are basically the h-1203 model rebranded with the Barclay headstock.  As I have noted many times before Harmony would make guitars for different catalogs, each catalog giving the instruments their own brand name.  In this case it is believed that these Barclays were made for W.T Grants department store, more widely known simply as Grants.  You don't see many of these Barclay branded instruments around, certainly not in this good of shape.

This guitar is all original and besides a neck reset at some point is completely untouched.  It looks almost unplayed.  I had to ask if it was refinished because the finish looked so good on it.  It wasn't refinished, just super clean.  This guitar has the Sovereign H-1203 specs.  15" lower bout, 11.5" upper bout, and a nice, thick neck with a 1.75" wide nut.  It is ladder braced and very loud with a less refined tone due to the ladder bracing as well as the fact that it has barely been played.  This guitar is already incredible, I can only imagine what it would sound like with X-bracing as well as a pin bridge.  Particularly attractive was the sunburst finish on it.  Most(is not all) Sovereigns had a natural finish, making this even more of a rarity.

Is this thing clean or what?

Made in the good ol' USA.  You don't get to see that much anymore.  Grants closed down in 1976.  You will find some electrics out there with the Barclay name on it that were made in Japan.  You can be sure that all these earlier model acoustics were harmony made in Chicago.

I have never been a big fan of the string through bridge.  I imagine this was a cost and time saving production choice.  I have converted a few of these to pin bridges and you can hear a pretty big difference in tone quality.

A little tough to see, but if you squint you will notice a date stamp as well as another made in the USA stamp below the date.  Unlike Kay, Harmony made it easy to date their instruments.  The numbers indicate the year and the letter(which would be an S or an F) indicates either a summer or fall production.  Here we see S-69, which tells us this guitar came off the line in the summer of '69.  Wasn't that the year that Bryan Adams "got his first real 6 string at the five and dime?"