Music Stores Serve Diverse Clientele

After The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, teenagers across America rushed out to buy electric guitars.

Ben Jack, a country music steel guitar player, saw the light and opened Ben Jack’s Guitar Center in Fort Smith in 1965. A year later, he opened a store in Fayetteville.

“Music stores back then had band instruments and accordions and one old dusty guitar in the corner,” said Larry Stark, who manages the Ben Jack’s stores in Fayetteville and Rogers. “Ben was one of the first around here to see the writing on the wall.”

Since then, Jack sold his Fort Smith store, opened a Rogers store, moved his Fayetteville store down the street, renamed the company Ben Jack’s Arkansas Music and retired to near Talequah, Okla.

Since opening the Fayetteville store in 1966, that store combined with the one that opened in Rogers in 1990 have sold more than 50,000 electric and acoustic guitars, Stark said. The two stores combined sold about 1,800 guitars last year.

Although electric guitars had been around since the 1930s and the first mass-marketed solid-body electric (the Fender Broadcaster) came out in 1950, it wasn’t until the electrified Beatles came along that sales boomed and kept booming for decades to come.

“When The Beatles hit, electric guitars were kind of a novelty,” Stark said. “They were used in orchestras and things like that. You never saw any old footage of the girls crawling all over Bob Wills or Gatemouth Brown or Blind Lemon Pledge or anybody like that. But when The Beatles hit, all that changed.”

Ben Jack’s is what’s known in the industry as a “combo store.” Ben Jack’s sells electric and acoustic guitars, electric bass guitars, drums, keyboards, amplifiers and public address systems. Full-line music stores, such as Sigler Music Center in Springdale, also sell pianos, band instruments and sheet music.

Stark said the two Ben Jack’s stores he manages keep a total of about 1,000 guitars in stock at all times. Although it’s under different ownership, the Fort Smith store still bears the Ben Jack’s name.

Because Ben Jack’s is the oldest music store in Northwest Arkansas, it has the exclusive right to sell certain established brands that other area stores aren’t allowed to carry, such as new acoustic guitars from Martin, Gibson and Taylor, all three of which are handmade in the United States.

Martin guitars, long considered the one of the best acoustic guitars in the world, range in price at Ben Jack’s from $600 to about $3,000.

Stark said he’s careful to keep several good, American, handmade guitars in stock, because production backlogs can bog down delivery by up to six months on such instruments.

“It’s like buying commodities,” Stark said. “The store that plans ahead is going to have them in stock.”

Retail stores usually discount guitar prices by 10 to 30 percent off the list price. One reason for that is so they can compete with catalog sales and Internet music stores.

Although mail order is sometimes cheaper, Stark said, there are many benefits to buying locally. It’s always a good idea to play a guitar before buying it, Stark said.

Sigler Music Center

Keith Sigler founded Sigler Music Center in Fort Smith in 1955. In 1973, Randy McFarland purchased the store. In 1980, McFarland opened a Sigler store in Springdale, and last July, he opened one in Little Rock.

McFarland said he expects the three stores to bring in more than $6 million in sales this year.

Sigler is different from other music stores in the area because it’s a full-line store that brings in most of its sales dollars from pianos.

But that’s certainly not all Sigler sells. The Springdale store currently has 48 electric guitars, 44 amplifiers, 40 acoustic guitars, 13 electric bass guitars and about 20 pianos in stock.

Sigler stocks pianos made by Yamaha, Roland, Suzuki, Kohler and Campbell ranging in price from $900 (for a used one) to $7,000 for a digital piano.

“We’ll get you a $100,000 grand piano if you want one,” said Jim Bell, piano sales manager at Sigler’s Springdale store.

Sigler’s digital pianos and keyboards start at $220.

The store carries several different guitar brands, including Fender, Takamine, Yamaha, Guild and Washburn.

Blue Moon Music

Les Haynie is the only luthier in Northwest Arkansas. Originally, luthiers made lutes, but nowadays they make guitars. Haynie’s training at Minnesota State College was in “repair and restoration of bowed and fretted instruments, and guitar and mandolin building.”

Haynie has owned and operated Blue Moon Music in Fayetteville since 1997. The store specializes in stringed instruments (with about 450 of them in stock) and probably has the largest selection in Arkansas of instruments in the violin family (about 100 violins, violas, cellos and upright basses).

Haynie said he has built about three guitars from scratch and spends most of his time doing repairs on other people’s instruments.

“I do repair, restoration and counseling,” he said.

Sometimes people bring in their grandfather’s guitar, and Haynie has to be frank with them when the instrument isn’t a collector’s item.

“I say, ‘I’m sorry, but it’s a $50 instrument.'” he said. “Old doesn’t equate to valuable … especially in the violin world. Everybody thinks they have a Stradivarius.”

Violins at Blue Moon range in price from $150 to $2,000. “We’ve had them in here at $5,500,” Haynie said. “People will pay that price for a great instrument.”

Blue Moon is the only dealer of new Collings and Paul Reed Smith acoustic guitars in Arkansas. The store also carries new Santa Cruz, Larrivee and Cort acoustics as well as used Martin and Gibson guitars. Vintage electric guitars and amplifiers are also a large part of the inventory at Blue Moon. Guitar prices range from $150 to $5,000 for a primo Collings.

Haynie charges about $1,200 to build a basic acoustic guitar. He said it takes him about 80 hours to build a guitar. That compares with 13.4 hours for Taylor, whose entry-level model 310 lists for about $1,300 retail.