Super Rare Country Club With A Spruce Top.

1958 Gretsch 6193 Country Club.

This 'Natural' Country Club weighs 8.40 lbs. and features a 17 inch wide and 2 7/8 inch deep rock maple body with a close-grain spruce top. The back and sides of the guitar are quite flamey and the back shows some nice 'birds-eye' figuring. Quadruple binding on the top and back and two large double-bound f-holes. Two-piece rock maple neck with an ebony center strip and a really nice medium-to-thick profile and a scale length of 25.50 inches. Bound ebony fretboard with 21 thin frets and inlaid pearl 'neo classic' half-moon position markers. Triple bound headstock walnut veneer and inlaid pearl Gretsch "T-roof" logo. Back of headstock with black 'widows' peak. Individual Grover Imperial tuners with stairstep metal buttons. Two-layer, bullet shaped black on white plastic truss-rod cover with three screws. Two Filter'Tron 'PAF' humbucker pickups, with outputs of 4.09k and 4.22k. Original black Lucite pickguard with Gretsch "T-roof" logo in black engraved from the underside. Two controls on the lower treble bout (one volume for each pickup) and one control on the cutaway bout (master volume) plus two three-way selector switches on the upper bass bout (one for pickup selection, the other for tone control). Plain "Arrow" knobs with cross-hatch pattern on sides. Melita Synchro-Sonic bridge on ebony base and "G" cutout tailpiece. All hardware gold-plated (minimal tarnishing). This guitar is in near mint (9.25) condition. Original Gretsch rectangular white label with the model number "6193" stamped in black, and the serial number "27406" typed in black, inside bass "f" hole. The guitar has been expertly re-fretted with the correct .080 thin frets. There are a few very tiny and insignificant surface marks on the top, but overall this is a spectacular example in near mint (9.25) condition. Housed in the original brown four-latch shaped hardshell case with blue plush lining (9.00).

"The now all-maple [Country Club] (leaving the White Falcon the only Gretsch electric with a spruce top, although an occasional and arbitrary C.C. does occur with a spruce top, especially in 1958 and '59), 17-inch-wide, 3 1/2-inch-deep, 25 1/2-inch scale length, true f-hole body is multiple-bound, top and back, in four plies of black and white plastic. The choicest, most highly figured maple plywood is reserved for the body of the 6193 in natural finish." (Jay Scott, The Guitars of the Fred Gretsch Company, p. 45).

"The Country Club was in many ways Gretsch's most traditional guitar...[and] also among the company's best. Among Gretsch's first commercially successful electrics, the Country Clubs were directly descended from the 6030 and 6031 of the Synchromatic line, which were in turn directly descended from the pre-war 'cat-eye' Synchromatic 300. In other words, the 6192 and 6193 Country Clubs were 17-inch pedigreed jazz boxes when they were introduced in 1951. They were the largest Gretsch electric models, other than the White Falcon, and the only guitars in the line other than the Falcon to use a spruce top, although spruce is rarely found after '55" (see The Gretsch Pages at http://www.gretschpages.com/models/6192club/index.php).