1988 Mosrite Semie Moseley Signature Electric Guitar – Sparkle Pink

There might have been a little bit of Glen Campbell in Semie Moseley – maybe just a dash of Elvis, too. At nearly 6-foot 4 and 200 pounds, with thick, dark hair, a movie-star smile, near-virtuoso proficiency on the guitar and a warm, appealing baritone voice, he might have been a hit-maker himself.

But Moseley was infatuated – no, obsessed – with guitars. He couldn’t find one that felt or sounded quite like he wanted, so, while still a teen-ager, he started building them himself. And build guitars he did – perhaps 50,000 of them, most constructed in a warehouse just across the tracks from the Bakersfield Convention Center.

“It was a beautiful guitar,” said Gene Moles, a Bakersfield session guitarist, member of Jimmy Thomason’s TV band, and assembly-line inspector for Mosrite guitars. “It was a well-designed instrument. It felt good to a guitar player when he grabbed it. It had a narrow neck and a low profile, so you didn’t have to push down as hard on the strings to play it. And it had what we called ‘speed frets,’ where you could slide up and down the neck without getting held up on speed bumps (high-profile frets).”

At the peak of production in 1968, Semie, his brother Andy and their crew of 107 employees were cranking out 1,000 Mosrite guitars per month – acoustics, standard electrics, double-necks, triple-necks, basses, dobros, even mandolins.