Paul Tutmarc

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Paul Tutmarc (1896-1972) was a Seattle musician and musical instrument inventor. He was a tenor singer and a performer and teacher of the lap steel guitar. He developed a number of variant types of stringed musical instruments, such as electrically-amplified double basses, electric basses, and lap steel guitars.

[edit] Career

As a child, Tutmarc sang in a church choir. As pre-teen, he sang and played guitar and banjo, and in his teens, he played Hawaiian-style steel guitar. He worked with a travelling vaudeville troupe. In his early 20s, Tutmarc moved to Seattle to work in the dock-area shipyards. In the mid-1920s, Tutmarc became known for his tenor voice. In the late 1920s, he performed on the radio and in a variety of theatres.

In the early 1930s, Tutmarc began teaching guitar and experimenting with new types of guitars, such as a Spanish-style guitar with a wire-wrapped magnet pickup connected to a radio.

Tutmarc's Audiovox Manufacturing Co. made electric lap steel guitars, and Tutmarc himself was often the demonstrator and promoter. He invented an electric "bull-fiddle", but it was not widely used. Tutmarc's #736 Electronic Bass Fiddle was designed to be used in a horizontal position. It had a fretted neck and a solid body. It was one of the earliest prototypes of the electric bass guitar.

Tutmarc continued performing until the late 1960s, and he kept on teaching until he died of cancer on September 25, 1972.

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