Link profile: José Ramirez

Category: Start / Great Cities of Spain / Madrid / Shopping / Luthiers
By most lights, the biggest name in Spanish guitar making. Let me put it like this - other guitar makers may, like kings or country & western performers, be called "the first" and "the second," especially when the craft is handed down through the generations - see Manuel Contreras II elsewhere on this page, for example. But the Ramírezs go on and on, and the effect created is not so much regal as pharaonic. Preceding the current head of family, Amalia Ramírez, go the names José Ramírez I, Manuel Ramírez, and José Ramírez II, III and IV, who were, have been, are and will surely continue to be legendary guitar makers, a real dynasty of luthiers. I am not an authority, but José Ramírez is almost certainly the most veteran firm in Madrid (having celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2007), and it is undoubtedly the most influential, many of Madrid's other great guitar-making names having learnt their craft under the Ramírez wing. As if that were not enough, a Ramírez gave a legendary kick-start to the incipient career of the young Andrés Segovia. The story goes that in 1912, Segovia approached the Ramírez patriarch of the time, Manuel, with the unusual request that he be allowed to rent a guitar, as he could not afford to buy one. Fortunately for Segovia, a Ramírez customer who had recently ordered a guitar had famously got up the Ramírez nose by criticizing the guitar, presumably in order to beat the price down. Instead, Manuel had lost the Ramírez rag and more or less told the customer where he could stick his order, and so had a customer-less guitar to hand, which he allowed Segovia to try. He was so impressed by Segovia's playing that he gave him the guitar as a gift.
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