Gallagher Guitars
GA-72 Acoustic Guitar - Used
Listed at Sound Pure · Durham, NC · Dealer ref #4144
Tracked on Tonewood Atlas — view the full listing at Sound Pure’s site.
$4,400
Last seen 20h ago on dealer site
Photos hot-linked from Sound Pure’s site — never rehosted.
Specs
- Top
- Engelmann Spruce
- Back / Sides
- Cocobolo
- Neck
- Mahogany
- Fingerboard
- Ebony
- Body shape
- Grand Auditorium
- Nut width
- 1 3/4"
- Frets to body
- 14
- Strings
- 6
- Cutaway
- No
- Condition
- Preowned
Gallagher Guitars
Gallagher Guitars has built handmade flattop acoustics in Wartrace, Tennessee since J.W. Gallagher made his first one in 1965. The shop became internationally known after Doc Watson took home a G-50 in 1969 — the instrument he came to call "Ol' Hoss" — and played it on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's 1972 Will The Circle Be Unbroken, the recording where Merle Travis said it "rings like a bell." The company has passed through three generations of Gallaghers and, since 2019, has been carried forward by David and Reina Mathis using the same patterns, molds, and jigs J.W. built. Production stays small — about three months and 70 to 80 hours of bench work per guitar, with the same workmanship across every model regardless of trim level.
Sound Pure
Sound Pure sits at 808 Washington Street in downtown Durham, North Carolina — on the same block as the Durham Athletic Ball Park made famous by the Kevin Costner film Bull Durham. The shop is unusual in scope: three businesses run as one integrated facility — a boutique guitar gallery, a professional recording-equipment retailer, and a multi-room recording studio (with a ~1,000 square foot live room and a 7-foot Steinway grand). The three sides feed each other in a way no other dealer in the atlas matches: a buyer considering a serious acoustic can demo the instrument through a real, mic'd-up recording chain made up of the same high-end gear Sound Pure also sells. The boutique acoustic shelf is one of the deepest in the atlas, anchored by Bourgeois, Collings, and Boucher each at scale, with meaningful Goodall, Lowden, Santa Cruz, and Iris alongside, plus rotating Larrivée, Fairbanks, Huss & Dalton, McPherson, Petros, and Beneteau. Sold listings remain visible on the public storefront for an extended period, so the brand range that passes through Sound Pure over time is wider than any single-day snapshot suggests — Furch, Gallagher, Pre-War, Preston Thompson, Tom Bills, and Tom Ribbecke have all rotated through. Sound Pure is owner-operated by recording professionals who built the studio infrastructure themselves and use it daily, and that engineering-first orientation runs through the gear curation. For boutique-acoustic buyers who care how an instrument records as much as how it plays, Sound Pure's three-way integration is genuinely distinctive.
