Letritia Kandle had a dream, echoes of which are heard whenever a rock group plugs its guitars into loud amplifiers and runs an extension cord to an electrical outlet.
The spark for that dream — a 26-string guitar — came to her “while waiting for an appointment on one of the upper floors of a tall office building in Chicago,” she later wrote in Music Studio News.
“It was summer and from the large window facing the West from where I was sitting, the sun like a huge ball of fire, surrounded by a myriad colors, sky blue, pink, yellow, purple, and green was dropping by the horizon, there appeared an instrument seemingly blown of glass.”
Expanding on that initial image, Kandle envisioned a guitar approximating the tonal range of an organ and with the capacity to put on a light show, to boot. That was quite a vision, considering that the traditional guitar of the day was a six-string instrument that emitted pleasant, but relatively soft, tones.
Indeed, the realization of Kandle’s dream required a musical behemoth: Dubbed the Grand Letar, it weighed 263 pounds, traveled in a 150-pound case, and had a price tag that blinded prospective buyers. The 1937 prototype, designed by Kandle and assembled by her father, was the only one ever built.
The Grand Letar’s role in the evolution of the electric guitar was forgotten until Paul Warnik, a vintage guitar collector, stumbled upon the instrument’s story. He discovered that Kandle had stored the Grand Letar under the basement stairs of her home in northwest suburban Barrington.
She gave custody of it to Warnik, who had it restored, and it was played for the first time in five decades at the 2008 International Steel Guitar Convention in St. Louis. Afterward, Warnik donated the instrument and Kandle’s papers to the Sousa Archives at the University of Illinois library.
Born in 1915, Kandle was raised in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood in an era when middle-class girls took piano lessons. But she changed instruments after seeing “In Old Arizona,” a movie featuring a Spanish guitar. Her instructor touted the Hawaiian guitar, an alternative that wasn’t cradled in a performer’s arms but lay flat across the lap.
Her timing proved propitious. In the ensuing Great Depression, all things Hawaiian became a dreamy pop-culture alternative to the grim reality of the 1930s. The Hawaiian guitar’s twangy voice spoke of whitecaps rolling across sandy beaches.
Kandle formed and gigged with a Hawaiian guitar sextet, the Kohala Girls. She subsequently performed with the Chicago Plectrophonic Orchestra, a 50-member group that plucked and strummed guitars, banjos, mandolins and string basses, plus accordion players and percussionists. She later married Walter Lay, a bassist in the orchestra.
As her career was progressing, she wanted to explore more complex genres. But the Hawaiian guitar had what she saw as a limited potential for jazz and classical music. Six strings can only produce so many notes. Other musicians were trying to expand the instruments, musical vocabulary by constructing guitars with two necks, and thus more strings.
Why stop at two necks? Kandle reasoned. “Have you ever indulged in dreaming?” she later wrote in Music Studio News.
“If you have, you know that there are primarily two different kinds — one where the dreamer tries to escape from the reality of living, and one where the dreamer sets a mental goal for himself, and then tries by hard, honest endeavor to reach it in reality.”
Hers was of the second variety, and she described her vision to her father, an engineer specializing in earth-boring equipment: “A guitar that would enable me to stand while playing it, one that would sound full, like an organ, and yet produce tones like a vibraharp.”
He built her a guitar with three six-string necks and two four-string necks atop a cast aluminum console. The Hawaiian guitar had already swapped a wooden body for a metal one, giving it the alternate name of a steel guitar. Inside the Grand Letar was an array of colored light bulbs linked by an electrical switching system that projected a rainbow through a glass window, swapping one hue for another in accord with the music’s tempo.
“The problems we encountered were many, each one had to be dealt with separately — a metal had to be chosen for the casting, that would not expand or contract when in contact with heat — sizes of strings, electronics, etc.,” she later recalled. “The tuning was just ‘an act of God,’ entirely without precedent.”
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The Grand Letar made its debut at the Drake Hotel in 1937, where Kandle was appearing with Paul Whiteman. That same year, National Guitars, which hoped to market the Grand Letar, shipped it to New York for the National Music Trade Convention,
Kandle was pleased to see Alvino Rey watching her demonstrate the instrument. He was her hero, a famed steel guitar player and bandleader. She’d be honored to meet him, but he left before she finished playing. Two years later, a possible reason for Rey’s preemptory exit was revealed.
Gibson Guitars announced an electric guitar designed by Rey that incorporated many of the features of the Grand Letar. Most tellingly, Rey’s amplifier had twin speakers — a technological innovation pioneered by Kandle and first revealed publicly at the ’37 trade show.
Gibson became synonymous with electric guitars. National Guitars didn’t get enough inquiries to justify producing Kandle’s guitar. Or its kid brother, the Little Letar, a lighter version that was easier for Kandle to carry from home to Loop engagements.
In the 1940s she gave up performing in favor of teaching. She opened a studio in the Kimball Building at 306 S. Wabash Ave., which eventually had 14 instructors. An alumnus recalled the disciplined ambience Kandle created:
“When you took lessons from her, you played from the sheet music, and you played what sheet music called for. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Her studio also provided a path for Warnik, the guitar enthusiast, to connect with Kandle. In the 1940s she wrote a monthly column for Music Studio News and occasional pieces for Banjo, Mandolin, and Guitar Magazine.
Decades later Warnik, a dedicated collector of all things guitar, learned she’d set her ideas and sketches of guitars down on paper. He saw her name in a guitar encyclopedia, so he knew what Kandle had accomplished. But was she alive, and if so where was she?
In the 1990s, Warnik bought a vintage guitar with a receipt attached bearing the address of Kandle’s studio. In 2007, he met a former student at a guitar convention who gave him Kandle’s home address in Barrington.
His visit left her nonplussed. “All I ever tried to do was elevate the steel guitar into a more versatile instrument that was capable of playing other styles of music, like modern and classical, not just Hawaiian,” she told him.
A story was pitched to Vintage Guitar magazine, and a footrace with the Grim Reaper ensued.
Kandle was 94 and gravely ill. Warnik and Kandle’s friends were determined that she would know that her story was being told before she passed. So as the August, 2010 issue of Vintage Guitar rolled off the press, one of them grabbed a copy and rushed to the hospital bed where Kandle lay and showed it to her. Three days later, she died.
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