Kay Musical Instrument Company Kay Musical Instrument Company Kay Musical Instrument Company was a musical instrument manufacturer of the United States, in operation from the 1930s until the 1960s. Kay was established in 1931 in Chicago, Illinois, by Henry Kay Kuhrmeyer, from the assets of the former Stromberg-Voisinet (founded as Groeschel Mandolin Company in 1890). Kay offered their first electric guitar in 1936 — five years after the Rickenbacker "Frying pan", and the same year as the Gibson ES-150. However, the Kuhrmeyer-owned Stromberg-Voisinet brand had produced the Stromberg Electro even earlier, in 1928, making the short-lived model arguably the first commercial electric guitar. The
Recorder (musical instrument) "silently practicing a tune" or "sing or render in song" (both almost exclusively referring to songbirds), long after the recorder had been named. Thus, the recorder cannot have been named after the sound of birds. The name of the instrument is also uniquely English: in Middle French there is no equivalent noun sense of "recorder" referring to a musical instrument. Partridge indicates that the use of the instrument by "jongleurs" led to its association with the verb: "recorder" the minstrel's action, a "recorder" the minstrel's tool. The reason we know this instrument as the recorder and not one of the