Santa Cruz MAH exhibit celebrates 50 years of Santa Cruz Guitar Co.

SANTA CRUZ - Before an acoustic guitar can deliver the delicately strummed chords that have served as the backbone to countless songs and courting sessions since the instrument was first invented, a whole process has to take place. It is not just tuning the strings, but finding the right woods to producing the right tone, carving them into distinctive shapes and assembling the strings, necks, frets, resonators and so on.

One company that specializes in this comes straight out of Santa Cruz. Fittingly named Santa Cruz Guitar Co., the business is celebrating 50 years of producing guitars for numerous clients, ranging from local musicians to established stars. The company has been honored with an exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, featuring 50 years' worth of guitars on display. The exhibit opened June 18 and will be on display through Oct. 4.

Exhibitions Manager Shanti Nagwani said Santa Cruz Guitar Co. staff reached out to the museum about possibly doing an event to celebrate the 50th anniversary. The museum asked if they wanted to do an exhibit instead. After visiting the workshop and working with founder and master luthier Richard Hoover and manager Brenda Martinez, the exhibit moved forward.

"Based on everything I learned from the tour with Richard and also with Brenda, I did my best to design an exhibition that I thought MAH visitors would appreciate and that would work for our guests and our space while also celebrating the guitar company as much as possible," said Nagwani.

With that, Nagwani created an exhibit that is very interactive and also tells the company's story.

Hoover told the Sentinel that he has been playing guitar since he was a teenager after trying to impress a girl around the time The Beatles first played "The Ed Sullivan Show." His parents had a copy of surf rock group The Ventures' "Walk, Don't Run," which convinced him that the guitar was the way to go. The move worked, as he succeeded in winning over his girlfriend - the two would later marry - but he was no longer interested in playing the guitar.

However, that changed when he passed by a newsstand with a book that had blues guitarist Mississippi John Hurt on the cover.

"I wondered, ‘How in the world do adults know about Mississippi John Hurt?'" he said. "I had to find out what this was."

The book was a guidebook on fingerstyle guitar, and it got Hoover back into playing the instrument again. Over time, he became interested in the technical aspect of how guitars were made. Not many books were available on the creation of guitars at the time, but Hoover was able to learn from books on making violins.

Hoover's craft was furthered when he moved to Santa Cruz and learned from other luthiers like Bruce McGuire and James Patterson.

"I learned how to translate what I was learning about classical guitar into the steel-string guitar," he said. "When I asked both of those guys what I could do to return the favor, they both gave me close to identical answers, and that was ‘Well, you could pass it on to other people in the same spirit I gave it to you.'"

With the help of investors Bruce Ross and Will Davis, Hoover founded Santa Cruz Guitar Co. in 1976.

"From the very beginning, it wasn't our intent to be the next Martin (Guitar) but rather take what I learned from the violin tradition and be custom builders, and there was a real need for that," he said. "That market didn't exist yet, so it was a long haul to get recognized and transition."

Initially, Hoover described the process as being "like a chain letter" where staff would sell guitars to friends who would sell them to their friends and so on. Feeling this was not a sustainable method, the company put out ads in the magazine Frets with a phone number and P.O. Box. This attracted more clientele, and the Sentinel declared the company to be one of the best crafters on Santa Cruz's Westside early in the company's tenure. However, the real turning point came in 1980 when Hoover received a purple envelope with a return address from London and the name "E. Clapton."

Hoover immediately recognized this as a reference to already legendary blues rock guitarist Eric Clapton and figured it had to be someone with a similar name. However, it really was Clapton who provided a number and requested a flat top cutaway, or an FTC model.

"We went from being one of the best craftsmen on the Westside to the people that made Eric Clapton's guitar overnight," he said.

Since then, Santa Cruz Guitar Co. has made guitars for a litany of notable artists from several genres: Bob Dylan, John Fogerty, Elvis Costello, Tony Rice, Janis Ian, Otis Taylor, Garth Brooks, Brad Paisley, Jason Isbell, Colin Hay and more.

"We're more often found in the hands of a studio musician that's in the credits but not onstage than we are with a big-name person because they get really lucrative offers from big companies like Martin and Gibson and free guitars they really get paid to promote," said Hoover. "When it comes to what's important in the studio, they're using a Santa Cruz."

Davis remained with the company for a year and a half and Ross for 12 years, but Hoover continues to maintain a staff of approximately 17 producing between 400 and 500 guitars per year.

"That may sound like a pile of guitars, but that's like half a day at a traditional company," said Hoover. "In our career, over 50 years, we've probably made a little over 20,000 guitars."

However, Hoover said Santa Cruz Guitar Co. provides things large corporations can not, namely the guarantee of a good sound. It is also a company big on sustainability, as it uses salvaged tree trunks for many of its guitars. One of its most famous, and one on display at the museum, was derived from a sycamore that likely predates the city's logging days. The tree purportedly was moored in the San Lorenzo River on its way to the Monterey Bay, back when it ran through what is now downtown, and buried under years of development. When the Loma Prieta earthquake struck downtown in 1989 and accelerated the need for redevelopment, the tree was unearthed at what used to be Gateways Books at the corner of Pacific Avenue and Cathcart Street.

Hoover estimates the tree is approximately 5,000 years old.

"Since it was buried very quickly in an aerobic environment, it didn't decay," he said. "It was preserved."

Other guitars on display were derived from ancient bald cypress, Brazilian rosewood, walnut trees, a sinker redwood recovered from the San Lorenzo River and a replica of a Depression-era mahogany guitar created during the 2008 Great Recession. While the guitars are behind display cases and can not be touched, there is an interactive area with soundboards for visitors to touch and a guitar they can strum.

Nagwani said this is quite popular.

"People love to play that guitar outside, and people really love interacting with the soundboards," she said. "I can overhear guests all the time talking about how they didn't know about the different skills that go into making a guitar."

The exhibit also brought back the overhead sound system previously used to broadcast purring noises for the museum's 2025 exhibit on pets, "Howl." This time, it projects an eight-minute audio loop of the sounds of the Santa Cruz Guitar Co. workshop, including drilling, scraping and even tuning and strumming.

Nagwani said she asked Martinez if she could visit the shop to record sounds, and Martinez told her they already had a recording on hand.

"This is an opportunity for us to really let people into the process in a way that they may never have been able to experience before," said Nagwani. "Celebrating all of the parts that make the whole is my main goal."

The museum kicked off the exhibit with a Santa Cruz Guitar Co. 50th anniversary concert at Kuumbwa Jazz featuring Santa Cruz folk singer Keith Greeninger and Oakland multi-instrumentalist Vicki Randle who played drums in The Tonight Show Band during Jay Leno's initial hosting tenure.

Hoover said the event was well-attended, and he even joined the musicians for a rendition of The Band's "The Weight."

"That was a great singalong and a message of community and unity," he said.

Hoover said there will be another anniversary concert at the Rio Theatre Sept. 19 that will feature local musicians and will be preceded by a block party.

"It's a big gratitude fest," he said.

Nagwani hopes the exhibit will open people up to the fact that skilled craftspeople are still prevalent, and Santa Cruz Guitar Co. is one example of that.

"I think they can walk away and be proud of the care that goes intro creating these instruments, and hopefully they'll also leave with a respect for the materials," she said.

The exhibit is on display in the Art Forum Gallery on the third floor of the MAH, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz. Hours are 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Mondays, noon to 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays and noon to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. For information, go to SantaCruzMAH.org/exhibitions.

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