He was subsequently asked to leave Rickenbacker when they learnt he was making his own guitars.

The name would be a mixture of the 2 men's last names, MOS-RITE to show his appreciation to the man who helped him realise his dream of designing and building guitars.īy '54 he had already done custom inlay and neck work for Paul Bigsby and had worked at Rickenbacker for Paul Barth under the tutelage of Roger Rossmeisl, where he learnt and perfected his German Carve. Ray Boatwright, who bought Semie woodworking tools in the early 50's and let him set up a workshop in his garage.

Mosrite was started in California (in LA) around 1952 by Semie Moseley with the financial help of a friend, LA minister Rev. Semie had been obsessed with guitars as a young teenager and started repairing, and later building them because he could not find one that felt or sounded quite right.

Semie's family had moved to California in 1940 after leaving Durant, Oklahoma in 1938. Semie Moseley was a natural designer, ingenious inventor and skilled craftsman who was in a prime position as a teenager to take advantage of all of this and was hungry to learn and develop his own mark on this new technology. While established companies like Gibson and Epiphone electrified traditional archtops, these 3 guys (and a couple of others) were developing what would become the modern electric solid body guitar as we know it today. Within a small area centered in LA, early developments by Rickenbacher, Dobro (who Mosrite would later own from '65-69) and the Ro-Pat-In Corporation in the 30's were perfecting the electromagnetic pickup design and by the mid 40's, Paul Bigsby, Les Paul (who had been working on it for over a decade) and Leo Fender, all of whom knew each other and hung out at Les Paul's house/studio in Hollywood, were all working on the idea of attaching this pickup to a wooden solid body electric guitar.

Southern California in the late 1940's/early 1950's was the epicenter of people and companies working to bring this new idea of an electrified guitar to players and eventually the masses. One nerds obsession with the greatest guitars ever made, and the genius who made them.

Mosrite bass guitar serial numbers