Goya T-Style Guitar Made in Japan Blonde, 1977 (NO LONGER AVAILABLE)

Here’s a rarity! This is a Goya T-Style copy, built during 1977 by Matsumoku in Nagoya, Japan, under contract to the Martin Guitar company.

This Goya T-Style guitar is a decent copy, though not exact. Unusually, it is complete and original, with the ‘Ashtray’ bridge cover and the original hard shell case. The body is Ash, and the neck is Maple, but the fingerboard is a separate Maple slab. The pickups are visibly different dimensions than Fender products. The tuners are original, and similar tuners are found on a number of other brands, even some Mexican made Fender products.

This guitar is in overall good, original and complete condition. It has been used as intended, so there is an amount of finish wear, and it could use a setup and a bit of attention to the frets. Overall, this is a very cool vintage T-Style instrument.  And it sounds good!

In the 1960’s, many Japanese woodworking companies started making guitars, and by the 1970s many were quite good at it. What became the Matsumoku company had been working with the Singer Sewing Machine company to produce cases, but as that declined, guitar building became the company’s new focus.

The Goya brand was originally used by the Levin company, founded around the turn of the 20th century in Gothenburg, Sweden and by 1936 had built 100,000 instruments. After the war, production resumed and in 1952 an American distributor (Jerome Hershman) noticed Levins at a German trade show and arranged to market Levins in the USA, but under the name ‘Goya’ and ultimately Hershman Music changed its name to Goya Music. In 1968, Goya Music was purchased by the Avnet company – an electronics distributor that had recently acquired the Guild guitar company and several record labels. This broke the Goya contact and the import rights went to the Kustom amplifier company, which went bankrupt in 1972, selling the name to Dude, Inc. In 1973, the C F Martin Guitar Company purchased Levin, and in 1976 Martin purchased the Goya brand. To make use of the brand, Martin contracted with Matsumoku to produce various copies, including this one, for importation to the US market.  This ended in the 1990s.