Cat’s Eye

This Gretsch guitar, built betweeen 1964 and 1967, combined elements of the company’s Blackhawk, Monkees, Anniversary, and Tennessean models with its most distinctive feature: a pair of cat’s eye-shaped soundholes, which were first introduced on the massive, 18-inch wide Synchromatic Model 400 of 1939. Dubbed the Model 6117 Cat’s Eye, it never made it into any of the company’s catalogs, but then neither did the Monkees or Blackhawk models. Those well-versed in Gretsch lore will notice that the Model 6117 designation was also used on the sunburst-finished Anniversary model, which went into production in 1958 and lasted all the way through 1975.