Circa 1914 Albert Shutt Mandolin – Used

This Shutt mandolin is in excellent structural and cosmetic condition. There are no cracks to the top, back and sides and apart from a small fingernail patch just below the pickguard, the finish is in fine condition. The frets were recently replaced, not by Gryphon, but the work was very well done. Thanks to the compensated bridge, another Shutt patent, the intonation is excellent. Even though it has f-holes, this Shutt doesn’t have the bark of a Gibson-style mandolin but instead it has a mellow, bubbly tone similar to an oval-hole mandolin. Shutt instruments are scarce in general and almost impossible to find in this condition. Includes the original hardshell case, which is equally clean shape. Bay Area folks might be tickled by the sticker on the case from the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, which was held in San Francisco on Treasure Island, which suggest that the mandolin has spent much of its life in Northern California.

Albert Shutt was a luthier and musician who worked in Kansas in the first quarter of the 20th Century. He built mandolins, guitars and harp guitars and he is best known today for making fretted instruments with f-holes more than a decade before Gibson and Lloyd Loar introduced the F-5 mandolin, the L-5 guitar and other Master Model instruments in the early 1920s. This example was probably made around 1914 or a little later and it represents one of Shutt’s simpler instruments. The genesis of this body shape is a mystery. The design was patented in 1914 by William Schultz, who was then the president of Harmony, the Chicago-based instrument company. On the same day, Shutt was granted a patent for a mandolin of similar design. Was this a prototype for a Shutt/Harmony collaboration that never happened? We may never know but we can say this mandolin has many of the hallmarks of Shutt’s construction like the clever, easily removed pickguard, the sycamore back and sides and high level of craftsmanship.