Prior to The Lost Years
Harmony Guitars was founded in 1819 by Willhelm Schultz and sold to Sears Roebuck and Co. in 1916 to corner the Ukelele market as Hawaiian Music was becoming quite popular at the time. At one time Harmony was the largest manufacturer of guitars in America, however, as the Japanese imports of the 1960's became cheaper and better made, and as higher end, newcomers like Gibson's Les Paul Jr and Fender's Mustang came to market, the allure of a USA made, factory built, guitar was starting to wane, and by 1975, Harmony Musical Instrument corporations was no more, with the name and assets being shuffled around various Asian companies.
The Lost Years - Understanding Asian Guitar Manufacturing
Traditionally, the world-class guitars of the world were made in the United States, at least that's how most people regarded it. Fender, Gibson, even Harmony itself in it's classic era were all American guitar makers with offices and factories in the United States.
American luthiery works a bit like this - Luthiery being often applied to guitar builders retroactively as it was originally the title of a "Lute Maker" - one of the Guitar's descendants.....
A designer or engineering team will work together to design a particular instrument with a certain set of goals in mind. Back in the early days, the 50's and 60's, much of this when it came to electric guitars was about innovation, comfort, versitility, durability, and of course, STYLE. Guitars are apparel, you do wear them. So R&D will draft something up, make a few prototypes, maybe even loan them to some famous players, and the "road testers" will come back with feedback to revise the design of the guitar into what the final product will be. Once the design is finalized, then it gets manufactured. For some places this means their skilled luthiers will put together instruments by hand (very rare these days), or more often than not, a series of building instructions are spread about the factory to create these instruments to meet a certain cost-point with the highest quality possible without raising the price beyond that price point.
In Asia, however, it is different. You have at least 2 different companies involved in guitar making. The first one being the company that actually designs and names the guitar and puts their name on the headstock (ie Hondo, Kramer, Samick, Tokai, Fresher, Global, Harmony, Memphis, Arbor, Palmer....etc..), and then the actual company that manufactures the guitars, often with the country of orgin being considered as a part of the price point. For example....
Say Harmony wants to manufacture three guitars - the H804, the H80T, and a nicer Les Paul model that's a limited run for this year's Sears Wishbook catalog but costs no more than $300.00. So for the H804, they keep with their regular contractor Yako in Taiwan who can produce a decent-enough Beginners guitar for $99.99 sale price. For the H80T, Samick in Korea is hired to make that model and sell it for around $129.99, to compete with Fender's Squier Affinity line that goes for around $159.99. Then they decide for the Les PAul they will just get Samick's nicer factory to make a nice, "tone wood" equipped Les Paul model for around $229.99. They talk to the people at Samick and Samick says "we can use the old Epiphone Special II design and use our cheaper pickups in it", so that's what they do. That explains how this works. Harmony is just a designer/out-sourcer based somewhere else in the world, and the building houses in Taiwan, China, and Korea - during the lost era - built their guitars for them.
The Lost Years - History - 1975-1980
So in 1969, Harmony folded and their name was rumored to be "passed around various Asian suppliers". What this suggests to me is several faceless in the USA companies bought the name to use on their guitars for a limited period of time. The earliest I can think of would be Teisco who was a Japanese company but seemed to start selling China built guitars sometime toward the early-mid 1970's before they went down. A LOT of the "lost era" Harmony guitars share "genetics" with these late-model Teisco instruments. Some of these include the Teisco ET-110 "Tulip" guitar which can be considered an ancestor to the Harmony H801 student model.
Harmony classically was well known for selling their guitars through the Sears Roebuck and Co. catalogs all the way back to the 1940's. Their main competitors at first were Danelectro - and some Harmony guitars shared the Sears "Silvertone" label with the Danelectro guitars during the 60's before they folded. It seems this relationship with Sears did not go away after the American dissolution of the company, and actually expanded, with their guitars also being sold in Montgomery Wards and J.C. Penney, the latter of which would become the store they were most associated with during the "lost era".
Between 1975 and 1980, it seems they started off with a instrument here and there showing up in Sears catalogs with their names on them, in particular being the 57-9568 - which was one of the first guitars to wear the "Marquis" label used later on higher end instruments in the early 80's, and the 57-1401, which was almost like a deluxe H802 with a vibrato unit (though some 57-1401s sold without a vibrato with the regular 802 bridge setup). It seems some of these may have been made by Matsamoku or Kasuga in Japan and not in China, at least, at first, sharing the factory with some very late Teisco models at some point possibly.
1980-1987
Starting around the end of the 70's, the Harmony "Beginner's Trio" started to show up: the H801 single pickup electric guitar, H802 double pickup electric guitar, and the H805 bass featuring a 4-string single anti-foil bass pickup. All three of these instruments shared the same or similar body design, all were evolved off the 57-1401 and Teisco Tulip by design, and the lesser sellers of this trio would fade away as the H802 gave way to the H803 and later.
In the past decade, while Harmony was mostly releasing "original" designs (or at least getting their name put on the headstock), the Japanese guitar companies started to commission and even manufacture reproductions of high quality vintage instruments that were far less expensive than their vintage counterparts. This became known as the "lawsuit" era (the 70's) because many guitar companies such as Gibson, Fender, and Rickenbacker, sued these Japanese companies (or tried to) for infringing on American Patents, Copyrights, and overall, just outright copying the guitars they designed 10-20 years before (not to mention doing a much better job of it). A big part of this motivation is the American guitar industry - outside the botique world of builders like Travis Bean, S.D. Curlee, Alembic, and Canadians like Warwick and Odyssey - was in big time trouble. Fender had been sold to CBS in the 70's and this lead to a percieved decline in quality across the board, especially after the 70's started. Gibson was now owned by Norlin Labs and getting all sorts of flack for design changes to their classic models including mini humbuckers on the Les Paul Deluxe, or multi-layer "pancake" mahogany bodies to save cost. So many professional musicians, who at first glance, seemed to be using old Fenders and Gibsons, were really now playing Grecos, Tokais, and Ibanez guitars from Japan that were built to look like the original American releases of those guitars, and performing on the same level, or close enough to some of the most desired instruments such as a 51' Nocaster or a 54' Stratocaster, or a 59' Burst Les Paul.
To add to it, the early 80's was an exciting time of innovation in the guitar world. Edward Van-Halen, along with his playing, made tinkering with your guitar even more mainstream than Jeff Beck did. Guys like Carl Sandoval, Rod Shoepfer, Paul Reed Smith, Tom Anderson, and Attila Balogh were building custom guitars for famous people like Randy Rhoades, Ritchie Sambora, Elliot Easton, Paul Dean, and heck, some guys like Edward Van-Halen would go into the factories and get to build their own guitars on the line themselves. Companies like Mighty Mite, Seymour Duncan, DiMarzio, Floyd Rose, Warmoth, Schaller, Leo Quan, and W.D. Music Supply were providing parts to either modify or build your own solidbody electric guitar from prefab parts, or at least have the electronics and hardware for an original scratch built design.
Despite the incoming of synthesizers and New Wave, guitar was HUGE still. Kids wanted in on the action, kids wanted to learn how to play en-masse, because it was cool. But a kid who asks for a guitar for Christmas but knows next to nothing, has parents who know next to nothing, and are too scared to fare the longhairs in the guitar store, looked to these Wishbook catalog guitars as a way to get their kid started, or at least get him to shut up about Eddie Van-Halen and start emulating him instead (as long as he keep's the volume down).
So to coincide with this, Harmony started offering more high end offerings from other building houses than the most inexpensive ones around this time. They revived/re-decided the Marquis brand would go to Samick built guitars from China/Korea that were of the mid-tier. How they did this was basically having the Marquis by Harmony label applied to various Hondo Deluxe Series and Hondo II guitar models of the time.
But at the same time, Harmony was doing a lot of inexpensive copying of their own. They released copies of the Lead Series early on, specifically the Fender Lead II, a series of mid-tier guitars released by Fender in 1979. They also had the H814 Flying V which was sort of a Flying V for the "beginners" level market, while the more upscale V666 has a confusing history due to the fact that both lower-end models were made, as well as higher end Samick versions known as the V666GT.
Some other interesting examples include the Korean made variants of the Cort effector, a guitar with built in effects, and even some possible cross-marketing with Synsonics, a company known for their "Terminator" guitars that had a built in amp (and shared a lot of construction and design earmarks with lost-era Harmony guitars).
The more popular models started in the 1980's though included the H802, which was the las surviving model of the initial 3 student models, which evolved into the H803 in 1987 by removing the odd 60's style pickups, swapping them with STrat pickups, and putting a pointy headstock neck on it (very weird design decision, lol). The H80T stratocaster copies started around this time too, also made by Samick's lower end Korean factory, sharing much of the design and build with Hondo IIs, Memphis 302 and 302HB guitars, and the Kramer KS400, which was Kramer's last guitar released in 1989 before closing in the 1990's. There was also 2 different P-Bass copies, an original dual Humbucker bass that resembled a larger version of the H805 with Humbuckers, and quite a few Les Paul variants including the H7011, H7000 (also sold as a Memphis and Global model), H7100 (reduced Les Paul), and a H90 Les Paul made in the cheaper factories the chepaer V666 and possibly even the H804 were made at.
By the end of the decade, Harmony's reputation of the 50's and 60's was long gone, now replaced with an image of being a cheap "Wishbook Guitar" maker. That first, chintzy, crappy, plywood guitar you started out on that now lives partially disassembled in a closet somewhere, with 1" of action, weak pickups, scratchy pots, and horrible hardware, and strings that have not been changed since Regan or Jimmy Carter was in office.
1990-2000
The 1990's were not kind to Harmony's lost era. Kind of surprising since the "Grunge Era" was entirely based in what people then percieved to be "cheap" guitars - mostly relics of the 60's, and some of them even being Student models. It would have been possibly a great time to come back and make a new version of the Bobcat or the Silhouette or Stratotone, but it was budget designers and makers guiding the ship.
Harmony started to reduce their lines down from a drastically expanded lineup by 1991 or so, leaving a P-Bass copy, the H80T stratocaster copy, the H804 "Beginners Electric Guitar", and later a TElecaster copy introduced around 1995. These instruments were mostly sold through J.C. Penney, though some releases managed to eek out of Sears catalogs as well. It seems it was not all bust though because it seems they also expanded their paint options on the H804 and H80T to include Sunburst, White, and Black, with some H80T's being found in Candy Apple Red.
By the end of the decade, the Telecaster was Discontinued, the Strat only came in Sunburst, and the H804 was only availible in Black or white at that point. In 2000, the name was sold to the Westheimer group, and the manufacturing houses changed, leading to some serious quality and design improvements to their two primary models - the H804, and H80T.
The Westheimer Years - 2000-2018
In 2000, production moved to a newer production house with quality standards similar to the Wal-Mart First Act guitars of the same period. The Harmony H804 was now the Harmony 218X models, with the last digit indicating the color of the guitar, and those were marketed as the "Harmony Vintage Guitar Kit". The Harmony H80T was sold as the "Classic Guitar Kit" and received several technical upgrades bringing it just below Squier level in build quality, and cosmetics were updated to have a pearloid multi-ply pickguard instead of the single ply white or black ones the H80T had for a decade and a half. For a short time at first the H80T was replaced with a "classic guitar" with a single humbucker in the bridge and a different body shape.
In 2000, 2 new models were introduced, the "Plexiglass" models, which included a Flying V and a Semi-Miniature Strat shape in a tiny, "Youth Scale" size. These were availible with or without the amplifier built into the guitar, similar to First Act's later Discovery series guitars. They had bodies molded out of purple or blue acrylic plexiglass.
Another model introduced was the "Harmony Jr." - a miniature Stratocaster variant with a single single coil in the back and a single volume knob. These came in candy apple red, pink, black, and possibly other colors, and were designed to appeal to kids, and the pink model was meant to open the door for little girls. The Harmony Jr. remained in production even after Westheimer stopped selling guitars under the Harmony name sometime around 2010 or later, renaming it the "Jay Jr.".
By the end of the 2000's, after a huge guitar boom due to Guitar Hero video games, and YouTube guitarists (such as myself), the revolution of the Internet all but doomed Wishbooks and thusly also Harmony's old methods of selling guitars through that form primarily. It seems in the 2010's Harmony's Westheimer era continued to sell their models on E-bay, either as overstock, or an attempt to "get with the times". However, with budget guitars such as the Squier Bullet and Affinity series coming even cheaper than the Westheimer era Harmony 218x student guitars which were out performed, out designed, and out-classed by even a simple single humbucker Squier bullet in QC, build quality, and features, the writing was on the wall. The era of the cheap plywood Wishbook plank was over. And there was no way Harmony was going to compete by continuing to do what it had been doing for nearly 35 years. In 2018, the company was sold to the BandLab company of Singapore.
Harmony Guitars Today
In the 2020's, Harmony has rebuilt and recreated itself as a quality guitar maker worldwide, and come back from 35 years of plywood budget axes. FIrst off, I'm sure it really helped that St. Vincent, a current day guitar hero, used vintage Harmony guitars early in her career. Currently they make the Silhouette, Juno, and other models of guitar and are higly active on social media.
So why would I make a website about this "lost era"? Well, because people my age grew up with these plywood boat paddles. Not just did we learn to play on them, guys like myself, relentless tinkerers, grew up learning to fix, setup, build, repair, and modify guitars using these cheap "lost era" Harmony guitars. They were cheap, plentiful (often under $50USD used), and easy to get our hands on. Nobody wanted them, and they were reputed to be horrible. That's why this site has an extensive section on modifications and tweaks to make these guitars better, including my own section on an idea to revive the H801/802/803/804/805 models as something more akin to a Squier Affinity or Epiphone Special.