MARTIN ARCHIVES
Martin Guitar has pretty much been there from the beginning. Whether it’ s country, bluegrass, blues, you name it.”
This is not mere boosterism. The claim is visible in the archive in the same way that everything else is visible in the archive. The instruments from the 1920s and 1930s that show up in the earliest commercial country recordings, the prewar dreadnoughts that defined what a bluegrass guitar sounds like, the OOOs and OMs that showed up in the folk revival, on the Unplugged stage, in the hands of John Mayer and Paul Simon and Eric Clapton and generations of players who shaped what American popular music became. The record is complete.
What Ahner finds most durable about the company, after eight years of working inside its history and 14 years of working inside the company itself, is the consistency of the underlying orientation: the company has never built a guitar to build a guitar. It builds what players want, and it has been trying to figure out what that is for nearly two centuries.“ The perfect guitar today isn’ t the perfect guitar 100 years ago,” he says.“ That’ s why it’ s always important for us to be tuned into what guitar players want.”
The baptismal certificate from 1765 is filed carefully in its archival box. The napkin sketch of the SC-13E is filed carefully nearby. Between them, the archive holds the record of how one thing became the other, and why it is still becoming.
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• Mike Longworth •
• Dick Boak •
The Predecessors: Longworth and Boak
Mike Longworth laid the groundwork for what the Martin archive is now. Writing Martin Guitars: A History in the 1970s, he worked with what were then simply the company’ s old records, not yet organized into a formal archive, and imposed on them enough structure and documentation to make systematic research possible. Without that foundational work, the archive Ahner manages today would look very different.
Dick Boak, who held the archivist role for decades before Ahner, was a figure of unusual breadth at Martin: artist relations, communications, writing, building, the public face of the company’ s history in many contexts. His books and writings on Martin instruments remain standard references.
That breadth extended into how he handed the role forward. Boak recognized something in Jason Ahner during his time in customer service, mentored him, and recommended him as a successor when he retired. The institutional knowledge that transfers between archivists in that kind of relationship is not fully documentable. It is the other archive, the one that lives in people rather than boxes, and it continues in the act of one person teaching another how to see.
In the end, that may be the thread that holds the whole enterprise together.
96 | SUMMER 2026