Kay K-125 Guitar ...by Emma Gunn

Kay K-125 Guitar (1952 or 1953)

...by Emma Gunn

We purchased this Kay guitar at a garage sale many years ago. It was out in the grass, propped against a tree.

It seems to be in decent shape. There are no chips or cracks, but it does need refinishing. It plays well and sounds surprisingly good for its age.

There is one lipstick pickup, with volume and tone controls. Everything works, the neck is straight, the frets are good and the tuning pegs work fine. The amplifier cord comes straight out of the guitar body.

We believe it's a K-125, thanks to some information we received. If so, it's very rare and may be a collector's item. Kay only made the K-125 in 1952 and 1953.

We haven't tried to refinish it because we don't know if refinishing would hurt its collectibility.

Interestingly, the gentleman who sold it to us said it was the last day of his garage sale. He said he was going to haul everything that wasn't sold to the dump or Goodwill. We offered him $20 and he jumped at it. We didn't know anything about the guitar, but we just couldn't stand the thought of it ending up in the dump. It looks like it was our lucky day!

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Many thanks to Andrew Bingham for sending us the following information:

January 28, 2012 - Don't know too much about it, but it does indeed look like you have the Kay K-125. I'm a big Elmore James fan and he played one of these so that's what piqued my interest. It was a budget guitar put out by Kay, also put out under one or two different brand names apparently.

FYI, the pickup in the K-125 is supposedly the same as is found in the Kay/Silvertone Thin Twin, which is more of a semi hollow body guitar, and has two of those pickups. The Thin Twin is somewhat rare and collectible, but is still somewhat more common than the K-125 from what I can tell because they manufactured it over a much longer time period.

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