The Little Joe

The Little Joe was sold at the very beginning of the 20th century for the amazing price of $1 by the Harp-O-Chord Company of Columbus, OH. The design was patented in 1903 by C. E. Brown and is one of the strangest instruments you will ever encounter. It had a round body like a banjo, a weirdly shaped neck, only two frets and a harmonica attached to it, The two frets were positioned where the 5th and 7th frets would normally be. The instrument's four strings were tuned to an open C chord, thus holding your finger across all the strings on the 1st fret plays an F chord and on the second, a G chord. Combined with a harmonica in the key of C, a beginning player could easily play three chord accompaniments to a melody played on the harmonica.

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I first heard of this through a Shane Speal video about a Little Joe he bought and then reproduced. I decided to make my own by cutting a one piece body, neck and headstock from a piece of 3/4" poplar, cutting out the interior of the body and gluing on a 1/8" birch plywood top and bottom

Instead of Shane's use of a large binder clip to mount a harmonica, I used one of Pete Farmer's magnetic kazoo/mic holders (he invented the harmonica holders marketed by Seydel). The trick to these is figuring out the scale length and then cutting the right two frets out of a regular cigar box guitar fretboard so they line up with where the 5th and 7th frets would be at that scale length. I found a fret scale chart from CB Gitty very handy to figure this out. I matched mine to a 14-1'4" mandolin scale but should have used a 13-7/8" or even 13" to move the bridge a little closer to the sound hole. In case you're wondering about string gauge, I used from highest to lowest 30-36-41-46 to make the C-G-E-C tuning.