150 Years Of Epiphone

Luxury archtop maker, budget brand, rock icon. Epiphone has been so many things to so many people over the years that discovering its true soul as a guitar maker is a difficult task. That's why, as Epiphone celebrates a century-and-a-half in business, we've enlisted the help of vintage-guitar experts, leading artists and Gibson's own archivists to tell its harlequin history. For, when you look beneath the patinated surface of the brand's heritage, there is much that shines

- By Tony Bacon, Jamie Dickson

You'll know Epiphone today as Gibson's alter ego, with its line of well-priced alternatives to the senior brand, as well as reincarnations of some of its own historic models such as the Casino, Texan and Coronet. Epiphone's roots, though, go back further than you might think - all the way to Turkey in the 1890s, in fact, when Anastasios Stathopoulos began making lutes, violins and other instruments.

Anastasios emigrated with his family to the United States in 1903, in the process losing the final 's' of their surname, and he set up in business in New York City, successfully making mandolins, which were in vogue at the time, and also banjos, much favoured by early jazz players in the city and beyond.

When Anastasios died in the mid 1910s, his son Epaminondas began to run the business. He was known as Epi, and at first he renamed the firm as House Of Stathopoulo, introducing the Epiphone brand in 1924 and bringing in his brothers Orphie and Frixo. Again following instrumental fashion, as the guitar began to make its voice heard, Epi added the Recording line of carvedtop and flat-top acoustics in 1928, some with a distinctive curved cutaway. In the same year, Epi again renamed the business, this time as the Epiphone Banjo Company.

In 1931, along came Epiphone's Masterbilt archtops: De Luxe, Broadway, Triumph, Royal and Zenith, plus a few years later the Tudor, Spartan and Regent. They competed directly with the market leader, Gibson, and in many ways were superior. The Masterbilts marked the start of a battle for leadership in the acoustic archtop market between the two American brands, with bigger sizes and bigger claims throughout the 1930s and into the 40s for models such as Gibson's Super 400 and Epi's Emperor.