Meet the Maker: C.F. Martin IV

from his 2005 talk at the National Music Museum

Originally published in American Lutherie #91, 2007



As a young man, my great-great-great grandfather Christian Frederick Martin apprenticed with his father in my family’s furniture business. That’s what the Martins did back in the very early 1800s. Their little town of Markneukirchen was populated with instrument builders, many of whom came from Bohemia, what is today the Czech Republic. In one of those weird political-religious things, a town of instrument builders in Bohemia was invited to pick up and move over the mountain to resettle in Markneukirchen, which is in Saxony in eastern Germany. So there was a history in Markneukirchen of building musical instruments.

The guitar was becoming more popular in northern Europe. For some reason, the young man that we now call C.F. Senior was inspired to take an interest in guitar building. This is all undocumented oral history, so we don’t really know what inspired him. I really would love to have been a fly on the wall: the family is sitting around the dinner table when he says to pop, “Oh, by the way, I don’t think I want to join the family furniture business. I want to build guitars.”