Up through its final years, the company was still touting: “We’ve produced millions of instruments, but we make them one at a time,” and it wasn’t just a slogan. In reality, it was Harmony’s stubborn dedication to genuine craftsmanship that eventually got them overrun by foreign competition in the 1970s. But to reduce the company’s output down to the single adjective of “cheap”-or to equate them to the auto-machined Asian imports of the modern day-would be hitting a mighty discordant note. Sure, Harmony was always the unashamed brand of the common man, and their affordably priced products were churned out en masse and sold predominantly through the pages of mail order catalogs. Unfortunately, when we’re talking about “the arts,” such a legacy of quantity can often presume a deficiency in quality-warranted or not. ![]() Racine Ave., Chicago, IL įor about 80 years, Chicago’s Harmony Company consistently ranked among the largest producers of stringed instruments in the world. ![]() Museum Artifact: Roy Smeck Soprano Ukulele, c.
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