Gallagher Guitars

Gallagher Guitars began in 1965 when J.W. Gallagher, a Tennessee woodworker, decided he could build a better flattop than the inexpensive Shelby line he'd been setting up at the Slingerland drum factory in Shelbyville. He had previously made scale-model airplanes and rockets; when that work dried up, Slingerland hired him to run their new guitar production. After a few years there, J.W. wanted to apply the standards he held for his furniture to instruments of his own. He started the Gallagher Guitar Company and built the first one at his bench. The shop, based in Wartrace, Tennessee, has been making instruments the same way ever since. The defining moment in the company's early life came in 1969 at the Fiddler's Convention at Union Grove. J.W. and his son Don brought a rosewood G-70 and a mahogany G-50 to demo on the convention grounds. After the festival, they stopped by Doc Watson's house so Doc could play them. Watson was partial to the G-50; J.W. had built it with a production crack and hadn't wanted to send it out into the world. They reached an arrangement: Watson could keep and play the guitar as long as he wanted, returning it whenever he was done. That G-50 became "Ol' Hoss," and it appears on the 1972 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album Will The Circle Be Unbroken — the session where Merle Travis listened to Doc play and said the guitar "rings like a bell." Watson played Gallaghers for the rest of his career, and the company eventually formalized the Doc Watson model around the C-profile neck shape he had asked J.W. to carve for him. J.W. retired in 1976. His son Don ran the shop for the next four decades, joined eventually by Don's son Stephen, who became owner in 2015. In 2019, David and Reina Mathis acquired the company with Don's and Stephen's support, taking on every original Gallagher pattern, mold, and machine — some of the jigs and tools were originally made by J.W. himself and are still in daily use. David grew up nearby in Murfreesboro and learned his first chords on a 1967 Gallagher G-50; the move into ownership was about continuing the line rather than reinventing it. The first guitar built under the new shop was a Doc Watson model. Production stays deliberately small. A Gallagher takes about three months and seventy to eighty hours of bench work, and the workmanship on every guitar is the same regardless of price — the cost differences across models come from materials and trim, not from labor or quality. The shop builds custom and supplements with a small inventory of stock models on the retail floor. Today's team includes David and Reina as co-owners, luthier Garrett Case (Roberto-Venn trained) on body construction, Charlie Sloan (Musicians Institute Guitar Craft Academy) on finishing, Swavic "Rybski" Waclawik — a Polish-trained instrument maker — on inlay and CNC work, and Mark Maisano on repairs of older Gallaghers. The "G" headstock inlay J.W. cut sixty years ago from the masthead of the Shelbyville Times-Gazette is still the company logo, in the same font.