High Society
CLASSIC GEAR
From the lineage of the Country Gent and White Falcon, the 6196 Country Club is an exalted, if lesser known, member of the Gretsch nobility.
BY DAVE HUNTER
WHAT BETTER VEHICLE to drive to the country club than a Cadillac? And what better guitar to pull out for that swanky gig than a Gretsch Country Club — and a Cadillac Green one at that. Introduced in 1951, the Country Club had changed substantially by the time our featured example from 1962 arrived, embodying a form that will be more familiar to most of today’s players. Yet even then, it remained one of Gretsch’s grandest electric guitars, and a sign that a guitarist had “made it.”
Labeled with the 6196 model designation when dressed in a Cadillac Green finish, the Country Club sported a large, 17-inch-wide body like the Country Gentleman and top-of-the-line White Falcon, which was a clue to the guitar’s exalted lineage. Even two decades later, the single-cutaway Country Club traced its roots to the big pre-war Gretsch jazz boxes that sported cat’s-eye soundholes and solid arched tops of carved spruce, formidable acoustic machines that sought to rival the big-bodied archtops of Gibson and Epiphone.