Hedley Jones and his Automatic Guitar

Last week I was in Jamaica on a very successful instrument buying trip for the Musical Instrument Museum.  After I’d finished the Montego Bay-based leg of my work, I took an hour the evening before I drove to Kingston to visit with my old friend Hedley Jones, O.D.  A musician, inventor and astronomer, he’s an all around remarkable guy.  Born in Wakefield, St. Catherine in 1917, he began his professional life as a newspaper proofreader.  Then, in 1944, he became a radar engineer for the Royal Air Force.  The technical skills he developed in the RAF allowed him to do all sorts of things.  For example, he opened a radio repair business:

He also built and demonstrated Jamaica’s first traffic lights with his cousin Stephen in 1952.  More recently, he got into astronomy and built his own telescopes (he’s built both 4″ and 6″ refractor models and ground his own lenses for them).

But these activities pale in comparison to his contributions to music.  Hedley began his musical life as a tenor banjoist, but quickly switched to guitar, jazz being his main musical love.  He had a long career as a player and between 1985 and 1995 was the President of the Jamaica Federation of Musicians.   His impact as both a luthier and electrical engineer was substantial. In the video above, Hedley describes how he invented the first six-string electric solid body guitar in 1939-40.  Yes, invented. Don’t worry, I was skeptical when he first told me about this too, so I looked it up in the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper and found fairly compelling photographic evidence from 1940 to support this claim:

This means that Jones’s work predates the construction of Les Paul’s “Log,” which most sources (including the Gibson Guitars, the New York Times, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) date to 1941.  I’ve seen Jones’s guitars referred to in print as “automatic guitars” or simply, “Jones guitars.”  Between 1940 and 1944, he built several such instruments for other guitarists in Jamaica as well as some for members of the USA war services band stationed at the army base in Vernam Field, Clarendon.  Later on, he also built several double-necked or “twin electric guitars,” the first being a guitar and five string bass combo in 1961.

Hedley’s other substantial contribution to Jamaican music is that he built some of Jamaica’s first (and most important) sound systems, for operators like Tom Wong (a.k.a. Tom the Great Sebastian), Roy Johnson, and Arthur “Duke” Reid.  In addition, he had several protégés who built systems for others, like Clement “Coxone” Dodd.  Jones’s expertise as an RAF-trained electrical engineer served him well and made him top in his field; this background is likely why Mr. Dodd asked Jones to help him build the original Studio One in 1963.

Jones’s legacy is largely neglected in Jamaica.  However his contribution to Jamaican music history and his role in global sound studies really cannot be overstated.  Let’s hope that more will pay attention to his musical and technical legacy.