I came to America from Germany around 1902, knocked around New York a few years and then headed west. In 1914 I was building fiddles and repairing pianos in Los Angeles when this fellow Chris Knutsen moved to town from Seattle. Knutsen was making all kinds of wild looking stuff – harp guitars, harp mandolins, ukuleles, and Hawaiian steel guitars.
There was a steel guitar teacher in Los Angeles, Charles S. DeLano, who had learned to play from Joseph Kekuku, the first Hawaiian to raise his strings and play with a bar. DeLano wanted to sell Knutsen’s guitars under the brand name Kona. Knutsen built a few, but he was more of an idea man and wasn’t interested in mass-producing the same guitar over and over again. That’s when I got involved. The Kona guitar had a deep body with a seven-fret neck and metal frets, so you could play it either Hawaiian or Spanish style. Over the years I turned out hundreds of those.
What I really liked, though, was Knutsen’s Hawaiian steel guitar. The neck was hollow, so the body chamber extended way out there. That thing had some tone, I’ll tell you. I made a few improvements in the design and started building and selling the Hawaiian guitars under my own label and other names like Maui and Italian Madonna. In 1923 I formed the Weissenborn Company Ltd. and went into full production. I built a line of Spanish guitars and ukes, too, but that koa Hawaiian guitar was my bread and butter.
Rudolph Dopyera, one of the five Dopyera brothers, worked for a while in my shop while he was going to chiropractic college. His brother Emil later claimed that Rudy made some suggestions about strengthening the bridge of my Hawaiian guitar. Those heavy steel strings could pull up a bridge overnight if they were tuned too high. I don’t remember whose idea it was, but in the mid-1920s I did change to a heavy plate under the bridge. I don’t mind saying those Dopyeras borrowed a few ideas from me with their National Hawaiian tri-cone guitar. The body shape was similar to mine, with a hollow neck; it came in four styles the same as mine; and they even put a triangular inlay in front of the nut on styles three and four, the same way I did.
In the 1930s my business went to nothing. That National guitar was so loud all the Hawaiian players had to have it. Then came the Dobro, and then the Rickenbacher Electro. To make matters worse, the whole country went into a Depression. I tried cutting costs by simplifying my design, making teardrop-shaped guitars with no upper bouts, things like that. But the handwriting was on the wall. I was slowing down anyway.
I departed this life in January 1937 at age, I think, 72.