Joe Hall saw this with his own eyes many times. In those wild and wooly days of the A-Go-Go 1960s, the guitar-making world was a dangerous field where fortunes could be won or lost on a handshake deal.
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Although Joe says that he didn’t receive anything in compensation except the knowledge of how to build a guitar, he has no hard feelings because he feels that he got to study at the side of a master. Joe finally confronted Semie about the lack of a guitar, and, in his persuasive way, soon Semie had Joe working in the Mosrite shop just to speed up the production of his guitar! This led to an association that lasted three or four years. Joe waited and waited for the new guitar to be made, and he was losing money from all the gospel gigs he had to pass up. Although Semie was nothing short of brilliant when it came to making guitars, when it came to the business end he was an absolute nightmare. Soon Hall found out a thing or two about Semie Moseley’s business practices. He traded in his Gibson ES147 and paid $400 in advance for the custom order, a LOT of money in those days. Joe saw one of Semie’s custom creations and just about fell over! He had to have one of Semie’s guitars.
Soon kindred spirits made their way out to the tin shed in Oildale, including a young guitar maker named Bill Gruggett and a gospel musician by the name of Joe Hall who wanted a custom guitar.
They weren’t copies of Fenders or Gibsons-Mosrite guitars had many unique features including ultra-slim necks, zero frets, high-output handmade pickups, custom-built aluminum hardware, and body shapes that were a combination of hillbilly flash and the Jetsons.Īs Semie struggled to survive, word of this strange guitar maker from Los Angeles began to filter out to the countryside surrounding Bakersfield. The guitars that Semie made were different, and original. The year 1959 found Semie Moseley and his brother Andy living and working in a tin shed in Oildale, just outside Bakersfield. Los Angeles hadn’t worked out for him, and numerous attempts to turn Mosrite from a custom-order luthier to a full-scale mass-production factory had failed, although he did receive some notoriety from Joe Maphis and Larry Collins (of the Collins Kids) playing his flashy doubleneck guitars on the Town Hall Party television show. Semie Moseley of Mosrite guitars had just moved his operations to Bakersfield after years of struggling in Los Angeles, including stints with Rickenbacker and Bigsby as well as many years on his own building custom-order guitars. The story begins in Bakersfield, California, in the late 1950s. The story of Hallmark guitars and its namesake Joe Hall is an interesting, if obscure, tale in the history of the electric guitar.
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