Pol wrote:Quote from Beat Instrumental 1966, Feb no 34:
"Session Men try the Charlie Christian Pickup.
Many of the country`s leading session guitarists have started to use the famous Charlie Christian bar pickup. Anyone thinking of buying one himself though, will find it rather expensive. Selmer report that these pickups can only be bought with a Gibson electric jumbo guitar, so be warned".
To my knownledge, Gibson never manufactured such a model. Was Selmer refering to..a J-160 ?
Barney Kessel, whom Jim N rightly pointed out as a favorite guitarist of Hanks, used this bar pickup extensively.
Pol
Well, the story was simply wrong (especially the reference to a "jumbo", when what was meant was a deep-body archtop).
Gibson had made the Charlie Christian pickup available as a retro-fitment some years earlier and it was still available in the very late 1960s.
The only stockist in the United Kingdom was Ivor Mairants in Rathbone Place, London, and the pickup could be bought there for 50 gns (£52.50) or supplied fitted (with all the routing and drilling of an archtop guitar necessary for installation) for 100 guineas (£105).
To put £52.50 in perspective for 1966, the average gross male industrial earnings was then about £17 a week. A gallon of petrol cost about five shillings and a CC pickup, straight off Ivor's shelf, would have cost about the same as 209 gallons of petrol - or, in today's prices, about £1,120. Yes: one thousand, one hundred and twenty pounds (and double that if it was fitted to the customer's guitar).
There have been reports of customers referring to archtops as "jumbos". In fact, it is sometimes said that the Beatles ordered their J-160E guitars sight-unseen as single-pickup jumbos because that was what Tony Sheridan had termed his own single-pickup Gibson ES-175 in Hamburg. The 160E, though, was (and still is) fitted with a P90 pickup with adjustable polepiece screws.