Reintroducing the harmony guitar line: harmony, the world's most popular guitar brand for close to a century, is coming back with a faithful reissue of the famous Ritchie Valens model.

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Ritchie Valens' first guitar was a forest-green Harmony H44 Stratotone, a model that hasn't been in production since 1957--until now, that is. Winter NAMM 2008, which falls just short of 49 years since Valens' passing, will mark the reissue of the H44 and several of the other prized Harmony models from the middle of the last century. Fourteen models in all, in two or three finishes each, will return to the market for the first time in at least 40 years.

"I've owned the Harmony Guitar Company now for about 15 years, and this is something that's always been in the back of my mind," says Harmony owner Charlie Subecz. "There seemed to be a void because in all of the vintage guitar shows I would go to, there were very few vintage Harmony guitars available, so I decided to research the possibility of bringing back some of the old instruments. About two years ago, the timing seemed perfect."

What commenced was a sort of archaeological dig through company history. Books consulted by the company--most notably Ron Rothman's Harmony: The People's Guitar--trace Harmony's heritage from its founding in the late 19th century, through its heyday in the first half of the 20th century, and into the birth of rock 'n' roll and the guitar boom years of the '50s and '60s. Old buyers' guides and catalogs described the era's most popular models, which Harmony Vice President Chris Laguna sought out on eBay, sometimes buying two or three of the same model if parts were missing from the first. The company then shipped the samples to factories in Korea, where they were duplicated precisely, piece by piece.

"The reason for that is, we wanted to make sure we weren't just putting on another standard-issue pickup when the Harmony Rocket, for example, used a 'Gold Foil Mustache pickup,'" says Laguna. "We tooled and molded the pickups so that not only are they the same visually, but we've duplicated the frequencies, outputs, and magnets, so they sound exactly like the originals did."

The reissues do deviate from the originals in terms of several non-visual improvements, such as the addition of truss rods and Kluson Tuners and a switch from bolt-on necks to set necks, "a much more expensive process, but just a step-up feature that really doesn't change the look at all but enhances the performance," says Subecz. "Everything has been molded exactly the way it was done on the originals, but that's not to say the technology was so good back then that we've done it the same way."

Having re-created the old molds, Harmony also plans to make available individual vintage components. With the value of vintage instruments sky-rocketing--guitars that sold for $250 in the 1960s now regularly sell for ten times that--components are more in demand than ever, says Subecz. "We get two or three requests a week from people who, say, need a pick guard for a Rocket--and those just do not exist," he says. "For people who may have bought an old Harmony at a yard sale but the pickup doesn't work, they'll be able to take that guitar that they bought for $50, retro-fit new parts that will look and function the same, and increase the value of that guitar tenfold. Harmony is a 116-year-old company, and there's a tremendous amount of brand recognition and nostalgia to support this rebirth."

Founded in 1892 in a two-room loft on the future site of Chicago's civic opera house, the Harmony Guitar Company once manufactured fully half of the guitars produced nationwide. In 1915 the company cashed in on the national ukulele craze spurred by the Hawaiian exhibit at the San Francisco Fair of the same year. A year later, Harmony was purchased by the Sears Roebuck Company. When World War I cut off the industry's German wood sources, the company also became the nation's only large-scale violin manufacturer. By 1941 Harmony was reportedly manufacturing about 130,000 of the 250,000 American guitars produced each year.

The guitar boom of the '50s and '60s brought a flood of orders to Harmony's facilities on Chicago's Racine and Kolin Avenues, where the company was building now-legendary models like the H54 and H59 Rockets, the H15 Bobkat, and the H82 Rebel.

By the 1970s, however, Harmony found itself outpaced by Asian companies in the low-to-medium-grade instrument market. In 1975 the company shut down and held a three-day auction that covered two full city blocks on its former site of operations. Later in the '70s, the Harmony name was sold for use on Asian guitars, and a series of ownership and licensing changes followed over the next two decades. In 2000 the Harmony name was licensed to MBT International, which launched a short-lived limited reissue project of its own. But after just a year, MBT International revised its marketing strategy and reached a mutual decision with Harmony to terminate the licensing agreement.

Today, an intergenerational "Harmony underground" has emerged over blog pages, an independent MySpace site, and the official Harmony website, which drew 3,000 hits in its first two weeks of operation--among them visitors from Australia, Africa, Germany, and Brazil. "If you go there, it really is a culmination of generations," says Subecz. "A kid who's 18 playing a guitar will go onto the Harmony website or go on MySpace and really get interested in communicating with people who have the originals. But then again the people you can find on that space are 50, 60 years old. A parent may have played a Harmony guitar in the past and would like their son or daughter to play a Harmony guitar."

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At the same time, demographics are shifting against the "commodity low end" of instruments aimed at the beginning player, says Subecz. The "Echo Boomers"--those born between 1989 and 1993, when, for the first time since 1965, the number of live U.S. births hit four million--are coming of age. No longer children on entry-level guitars, these teens and young adults have moved on in search of better, more sophisticated instruments. Accordingly, sales of guitars priced under $400 have declined, while sales in the over $400 price point have increased. Harmony's series of reissues will retail for between $600 and $1,000, depending in the model.

"I think the dealer market has a very difficult time competing against the big-box store brands for the entry-level business," says Subecz. "We're going in the completely opposite direction. We're going with vintage reissue guitars that are excellent quality. That [Echo Boom] has moved onto their second and even third guitars. So there's a little more disposable income for a kid who's been playing for four or five or six years. A parent will feel, 'Well, he's been playing this long; let's get him something better.'"

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Harmony's vintage reissues will debut at winter NAMM, nearly half a century since Ritchie Valens was killed along with Buddy Holly and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson on a small charter plane out of Clear Lake, Iowa. Valens' brother and sister are scheduled to appear with his original forest-green H44, which will be under glass at Harmony Guitars booth 4606. "We're kind of excited that the guitar's actually going to be there and that his family is going to be at our booth," says Subecz, who indicated Harmony would host further commemorative events next year for the 50th anniversary of Valens' passing. "Nostalgia is probably the biggest part of this, and his music does live on. A Harmony guitar just has that special sound and that special look."