Mosrite was an American guitar manufacturing company, based in Bakersfield, California, from the late 1950s to the mid 1990s. Founded by Semie Moseley, Mosrite guitars were played by many rock and roll and country artists such as Tommy Tedesco, Kurt Cobain, Joe Maphis, Larry Collins, Buck Trent, Nick Mccarthy, The Ventures, the MC5, Iron Butterfly, Arthur Lee and Love, Johnny Ramone and Kevin Shields. A friend of Moseley, a singing preacher named Rev. Ray Boatright, was deeply impressed with Moseley's guitar designs, and put up front money for Moseley to found his guitar company. In gratitude, Moseley named the company by combining his and Boatright's last names.
Mosrite guitars were known for innovative design, beautiful engineering, very thin, low-fretted and narrow necks, and extremely hot (high output) pickups. Moseley's design for the Ventures, known as the "Ventures Model" (later known as the "Mark I") was generally considered to be the flagship of the line, but all of his guitars bore his unmistakable touch. Mosrite also produced an unusual double-necked guitar, which was the type favored by Collins and Maphis; this design was also used by Nick Nastos, lead guitar player for Bill Haley & His Comets, during 1968.
Semie Moseley began building guitars in the Los Angeles area around 1952 or 1953. He began by apprenticing at the Rickenbacker factory, where he learned much of his guitar making skills from Roger Rossmeisl, a German immigrant who brought old-world luthier techniques into the modern electric guitar manufacturing process. One of the recognizable features on almost all Mosrites is the "German Carve" on the top that Moseley learned from Rossmeisl. Around the same time, Moseley apprenticed with Paul Bigsby in Downey, California, the man who made the first modern solid-body guitar for Merle Travis in 1948, and who invented the Bigsby vibrato tailpiece, which is still used today.
Moseley made guitars in Los Angeles until 1959, when he moved to Oildale, California, just north of Bakersfield. He moved his shop to Panama Lane in 1962 where he designed and produced the first Ventures Model guitars.
Though a genius at guitar design and construction, Moseley lacked many basic skills necessary to be a good businessman, and the company fell on hard times repeatedly in the late 1960s and 1970's, but continued to produce Mosrite guitars until 1993 in North Carolina and Arkansas. Most of them were exported to Japan, where their popularity remained very strong. The quality of the instruments always remained very respectable. Semie Moseley died in 1992. His wife Loretta continued to produce Mosrites a year or so after his death. Today the Japanese company Fillmore holds the right to the name Mosrite and produces reissues of Ventures Model and a Johnny Ramone Signature model.
Kurt Cobain's Mosrite Gospel Guitar (one of only two 'Mark IV gospels') was featured in an online auction by Heritage Auction Galleries [1]in Dallas, TX, fetching $131,450.00.
Also click these links to read about Mosrite guitars:
http://www.modernguitars.com/archives/000231.html
http://www.modernguitars.com/archives/002017.html
http://www.modernguitars.com/archives/002016.html
