Thank you Bob! I regret not visiting you while I was on the east coast. I thought there would be time but it just slipped through my fingers. I will have to make a special trip to make up for it.
I agree with everything that you stated. The fact is, I have seen Gospels with better appointments than this one and they did not profess to have belonged to Semie. We have seen many guitars signed by Semie and of course this one is not. I think it is simply a beautiful example of a Gospel, albeit with the cheap tuners. I would value the guitar between $1,200 and $1,500; similar to a Celebrity-I.
Since we are digging deeper into this particular guitar I guess I would have to challenge Dr. Hal in his claim of being the leading expert on this ONE Mosrite guitar ONLY. There are many flaws in his story.
From the link that Adam posted:
http://www.northamericanguitars.com/gtrs/gospel.html"Semie Moseley was a much better Gospel musician than he was a businessman" - this is often quoted and may very well be his opinion but I will disagree. I think Semie gets a bum rap when it comes to his business acumen. The ill fated Ventures Award amps are in my opinion, what really doomed Mosrite. Even though Semie did not build these amps he took the honorable stand, to defend the company name, and covered the expense of repairs, etc. It cost him dearly.
"together with Reverend Ray Boatright they founded the Mosrite Guitar Company" - I've always heard that Reverend Boatright fronted some money so young Semie could buy tools to get started, but that does not make him a co-founder of Mosrite. Andy Moseley would deserve more credit here.
"he was so impressed with a Spanish Luthiers design of building guitars with violin joints...that he decided to build Gospel instruments that way." - this is a totally incorrect statement. The mortise and tenon joint found on the early Celebrities disappeared after about 800 guitars in favor of the Fender style neck joint. To my knowledge there has never been a Gospel with a mortise and tenon joint including this guitar GA009. It has the standard Fender style neck joint with four screws.
"Sometime in the late 60's, he began a group of 10 instruments, as Gospel prototype instruments. A few were less than a perfect fit so he cut them down and made them into conventional guitars." - What? That makes no sense to me. How do you cut down a guitar? The earliest Gospels are same bout as a Celebrity-I, the same neck except for the scalloped headstock and logo. The same hardware and so on. They are basically "flashy" Celebrity-I's. If you look at the 1967 Mosrite catalog you will see the first documentation of a Gospel. Even that unit looks better than this on in its appointments. It goes on to say that out of the ten so called prototypes he scrapped them all but two. I've read that Reverend Boatright had GA002 but have yet to confirm that. If Semie had GA009 then those should be the only survivors of the first ten. yet, I have photos of GA001 and GA007 and more GA series beyond that.
From the one and only post in this forum from Dr. Hal he states that Semie gave it to him in December of 1969 and he has had it ever since. If that is true, then I would assume that the link that Adam posted that goes into such great detail must also be from a website owned by Dr. Hal, copyright 2000. If that is the case, then paragraph two contradicts this story because it says that
"Semie either sold or gave away the Blue Gospel guitar and it found it's way into a St. Louis County music store, wherein I acquired it in the early 70's.". I've gotta call BS on this one.
"Research has shown that this was hand-built by Luthier Semie Mosely as his own personal instrument" - I would like to see evidence of that. If I could see the pot codes on this guitar I would expect that it was built during the "Hay Day" of Mosrite when they were cranking out hundreds or thousands of guitars per month. Semie was running a business and I doubt he had time to hand build this guitar. Just my speculation.
It would be great if Dr. Hal would mention the names of the family members who supposedly authenticated this particular guitar.