Paul Tutmarc

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Paul Tutmarc (1896-1972) was a Seattle musician and musical instrument inventor. He was a tenor singer and a performer and teacher of the lap steel guitar. He developed a number of variant types of stringed musical instruments, such as electrically-amplified double basses, electric basses, and lap steel guitars.

[edit] Career

As a child, Tutmarc sang in a church choir. As pre-teen, he sang and played guitar and banjo, and in his teens, he played Hawaiian-style acoustic steel guitar. He worked with a travelling vaudeville troupe. In his early 20s, Tutmarc moved to Seattle to work in the dock-area shipyards. In the mid-1920s, Tutmarc became known for his tenor voice. In the late 1920s, he performed on the radio and in a variety of theatres.

In the very early 1930s, Tutmarc began teaching guitar and experimenting with the electrification (and amplification) of various instruments including a piano, zither, and a Spanish-style guitar by using a wire-wrapped magnet as a "pickup" that could be amplified through a modified Atwater-Kent brand radio.

Tutmarc's Audiovox Manufacturing Co. was one of the very first firms to produce an electric lap steel guitar, and Tutmarc himself was often the demonstrator and promoter. He invented an electric upright "bull-fiddle" in 1935 but it mainly served as a publicity tool. His real claim-to-fame was the marketing of the fretted and solid-body (Model #736) "Electronic Bass Fiddle" which was designed to be used in a horizontal position. That then-radical instrument is considered to be history's earliest electric bass guitar -- and one that preceded the far more famous Fender "Precision" Bass by a decade and a half.

Tutmarc continued performing until the late 1960s, and he kept on teaching until he died of cancer on September 25, 1972.

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