The model
The Virginian was the last guitar Jim Burns designed for the company that bore his name — introduced at the start of 1965, months before the American Baldwin Piano and Organ Company bought Ormston Burns Ltd in September of that year. Burns, often called "the British Leo Fender", was an inveterate innovator, and the Virginian shows it. Thinline acoustic-electrics are commonplace today; in 1965 nothing quite like it existed.
Baldwin had lost Fender to CBS and bought the British firm instead, inheriting a product line aimed at a market it barely understood. Production of the Virginian got properly underway only after the takeover, and Baldwin-branded examples were sold from 1966 to 1969 before the operation wound down. First-generation Burns-logo examples are genuinely rare, even in England. Baldwin's Nashville connections, tied in with Sho-Bud, put a handful into the hands of country players — a young Johnny Paycheck among them — which suits the model's western-flavoured styling perfectly.
 
Specification
Laminated mahogany body with a heavily braced "controlled resonance" top and a round soundhole, giving the guitar a genuine unplugged voice alongside its electric one. This example is topped with hugely flamed maple — a dramatic, tightly rippled figure that runs right across the body and is well beyond anything typical for the model. Scroll-head maple neck — shared in profile with the Burns Marvin — with a rosewood fingerboard and Burns' signature zero fret. Scale length 24.5", nut width 1 11/16".
 
Two Bar-O-Matik pickups: a stacked unit at the neck with a blendable second coil, and a single coil at the bridge. They feed Burns' three-knob circuit built around the "density" control — one of his last and most unusual ideas, and the key to the guitar's range, from clean and woody to a thick, compressed midrange that sits somewhere between a hollowbody archtop and a solidbody. Completing the package is the patented Rezo-Tube unit, fully adjustable and spring-tensioned, fitted here in its short-plate form.
 
Originality and condition
This example is all original throughout — pickups, harness, controls, hardware, bridge assembly and finish. Nothing has been swapped, rewound or routed, which matters a great deal on a model whose distinctive electronics and bridge parts are effectively unobtainable today. The complete, untouched Rezo-Tube is a particular point in its favour.
It presents in very good condition for its age, with the light, honest wear you would expect of a guitar of this vintage and nothing that detracts from playability. It comes with a soft gig bag.
An unusual and increasingly sought-after 1960s original: rare, full of Jim Burns' engineering personality, and topped with a piece of figured maple that makes it a genuine one-off among surviving examples.