This Guitar Deserves A Standing Ovation

Ovation Guitars
Manchester Public Library
Manchester
Nov. 25, 2024

I went to the Manchester Public Library on a chilly Monday evening to hear a lecture about the Connecticut-made guitar that saved the music industry. Little did I know that I was also in for a delightful concert too.

Jim Lenn was the speaker/singer at the presentation, about Ovation guitars, an acoustic guitar that built here in Connecticut that solved one of the most vexing problems of the 1960s and ​’70s for acoustic performers. 

Lenn wove together disparate threads into a compelling narrative that stretched across time and space, from the arrival of the Beatles in the United States to the Vietnam War to the rise of John Denver. 

He started with the Beatles coming to the U.S. for the first time, and performing in what may have been the first concert ever held in a sports stadium — Shea Stadium, to be exact, with 55,000 screaming fans. The stage was set for what would be one of the greatest concerts ever, except for one small problem: the audience couldn’t hear the music. 

For electric guitars, the problem was solved with the march of technology, as more sophisticated sound equipment eventually made it possible to blast out music to thousands of screaming fans. But acoustic guitars, by their very nature, had a major issue. As concerts grew larger and larger, it became impossible to hear acoustic music unless the performer sat still in front of a microphone, which was hardly ideal. 

Around the same time, Charlie Kaman of the Kaman Corporation was looking for ways to diversify his business. They focused on aeronautical equipment, and had built a successful helicopter that the military used for rescue missions in Vietnam. But the military was undergoing major cuts. Kaman knew that if he relied only on the government for contracts, his business would suffer.

Kaman was also a talented musician, so talented in fact that he’d been asked to go on tour with a major band. So he decided that Kaman’s next project would be an acoustic guitar that would solve the problem of not being audible in large venues.

His company invented an acoustic guitar that instead of using wood for the bowl, used fiberglass, which helped with the sound projection. After meeting Glen Campbell, host of the popular Glen Campbell Goodtime Music Hour, Kaman Corp. invented the hex pickup, a microphone that can be set inside the Ovation guitar to connect it to a sound system. 

“You went to bed as an acoustic guitar player, and you had an unsolvable problem if you were trying to use this in big environments. You woke up the next morning, and everything was fine. The problem had been solved,” Lenn explained. 

Lenn went on to discuss some of the artists who used the Ovation guitar. That’s how I found out that he’s an even better singer than storyteller. He sang ​“Gentle on My Mind,” whixh was popularized by Glen Campbell. It was the perfect song to open with, as Lenn’s voice itself is gentle and beautiful, carrying across the space of a room with ease.

He also performed ​“Wild World” by Cat Stevens. It was a history lesson for me, learning about songs that I’ve heard snippets of in commercials and movies my whole life, and hearing that they owed their success to a guitar invented right here in Connecticut.

John Denver is probably the folk singer I’m most familiar with, and of course I’d heard ​“Take Me Home, Country Roads” before. What I didn’t know is that the song was originally intended for Johnny Cash.t Denver met the songwriters and convinced them to give him the song.

I never knew how much I enjoyed having history and music combined into one performance, but it was a great Jim Lenn is a talented man; I look forward to hearing his music again someday soon.

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Happy Thanksgiving! Jamil is enjoying the long weekend.