From the days when advertising was still more text heavy than it is now, here are some wonderful old Buescher ads to travel you back to the time when saxophones were coming out of the closet they had been in, and into the vaudeville theatres, speakeasies, travelling shows, front parlours, and consciousness of North America.
The 1920s saw the rise in popularity of saxophones, thanks in part to clever marketing such as the following 1923 advertisement telling you that you don’t have to spend years, or even months, learning how to play music, just get a Buescher True Tone and “See How Easy It Is”.
Just as an aside, I think it’s interesting that the ad execs decided to show both a man & a woman playing a sax. That’s pretty advanced thinking for 1923. So the saxophone was not only being marketed towards men…They thought a woman could operate a “complicated” piece of machinery like this…Interesting….Or perhaps, it was so easy, even a woman could play one, because it wasn’t complicated at all. 
Buescher 1923 True Tone Saxophone.
The next ad, from a 1925 edition of The American Magazine, tells you that you’ll be “The Life of the Party”, if only you would play the Buescher True Tone.
Without the stereo systems that we have to today, in the 1920s when people got together there was often a piano in the front parlour for musical entertainment. This was fertile ground for the C melody. With no complicated transpositions to do, the hobbyist sax player could just read the piano score over the shoulder of the piano player. PRESTO, you’re the life of the party ❗
Sure, she’ll be smiling like that at you after you’ve been playing sax for 2 years and you’re playing into her ear, but only after she’s had a lot of boot-legged or bathtub gin! 
Even then ads were totally fictitious.
Buescher 1925 True Tone Saxophone from The American Magazine.
But nothing is more fictitious, in my mind, than this 1928 ad featuring Tom Brown of the Brown Brothers. In this ad Buescher actually goes so far as to say that if you play a Buescher True Tone, “you don’t have to be talented…Play and earn while you pay” (for the saxophone presumably).
They tell you that certain saxophone players make between $100 and $500 per week! (In today’s dollars that would be $1260.82 & $6304.09.) Of course if the dollar amounts don’t impress you, the line about the True Tone sax player being the centre of attraction, and it being the key to social popularity might.
Buescher 1928 True Tone Saxophone (left). The famous Brown Brothers (right).
In 1929 the marketing machine targeted parents with this ad informing them that if they bought a True Tone Saxophone for their child, it would not only be a “source of lifelong satisfaction”, but it would also turn a “child’s mind toward constructive effort”, multiply “desirable social contacts”, and afford “the means of earning extra money”. And most importantly remember that “no child who can play a Buescher need ever be in want.”
Buescher 1929 True Tone Saxophone.
Well I hope you’ve enjoyed this little excursion down Buescher’s advertising past. It makes me appreciate my Buescher True Tone bass saxophone a great deal more. Now I know I need to take it to parties! OK, next weekend I’m taking it to my friend’s surprise b-day party. Now that will be a surprise!!! 
I do feel a little stupid, however. Here I’ve been working so hard for all these years trying to be a better sax player, now I find out that I don’t need talent. I’ve just been using the wrong horns!
That’s it. I’m selling my Selmers. I’m replacing them with True Tones. Anyone out there want to trade a set (SATB) of Mark VIs for a set of True Tones? Get in touch. I need to make that $1200 to $6300 a week, and those VIs just aren’t doing it for me! 
