Dwight Blevins began in 1992.

Blevins Harps began, its archived website said, “in 1992 when Dwight Blevins left an audio engineering career in radio and TV broadcasting to set up a workshop in Western Colorado.” The workshop was in Grand Junction, and the firm’s mission line was simple: “our mission is to build quality instruments, one at a time.”

When Dwight Blevins retired, the Wright family — Jamin Wright and his mother — bought the business, in the late 2010s; sources differ on the exact year. A Colorado trade-name filing lists Blevins Harps under Laurie Wright, at an address in Grand Junction. The Colorado Sun profiled the workshop in August 2022.

Its range was unusually wide for a small Colorado maker, including double-strung and cross-strung instruments as well as lever harps. The archived site listed models such as the BlevinSong, Aria, Bourree, Epic, Featherlight, RiverSong, Serafym, the double-strung Skyedancer and the cross-strung Xerafym and Xythara.

Closed, and for sale.

Blevins Harps has closed, and the business itself says so, publicly, online. Its Facebook page says the company “has closed its doors after many wonderful years,” and that the brand “is currently available for purchase.” We have no exact closure date: archived copies of its website load normally up to August 2024 and redirect from January 2025, so we say it had closed by 2025.

Under our rule for defunct businesses we say it plainly: Blevins Harps no longer builds harps, and its name was offered for sale. One warning for researchers: its old web address now redirects to an unrelated gambling site, so we do not link to it.

Its model names — Serafym, Skyedancer, RiverSong — are its most distinctive legacy.

Levers, clarsachs and a national harp.

The lever harp has deep roots in Britain and Ireland. Wales’s official tourism site says “The Welsh harp (also known as the triple harp) is widely considered to be the national instrument of Wales.” In Scotland, the Clarsach Society says it was “Established in 1931 at the close of the National Mòd in Dingwall,” with a founding principle “to advance the clarsach and its music,” and describes itself as “Promoting the playing of the Scottish lever harp.”

The lever is the defining part. The Clarsach Society explains that early harps used “semitone blades… screwed into the neck of the harp, one beside each string,” later replaced by “excellent, accurate levers” — hence “The lever harp, as it is commonly called.” Each lever raises one string by a semitone; a concert pedal harp instead uses pedals that change every string of a given note at once.

The lever harp’s other ancestor is the Irish harp. Ireland’s government says it has “the distinction of being the only nation to have a musical instrument as a national emblem,” a gold harp with silver strings on blue, modelled on a fourteenth-century harp at Trinity College Dublin. Guinness says it registered its own harp as a trademark in 1876, and that this is why the two harps face opposite ways.

The pedal harp’s mechanism goes back to one patent. Sébastien Erard applied for an English patent, number 3332, in 1810, for a double-action harp in which each string has two forks worked by a pedal, so it can sound flat, natural or sharp; a Royal College of Music thesis by Fanny Guillaume-Castel says the design “remains the standard pedal harp mechanism today,” and that Erard sold about a hundred in 1812, the first full year of sale.

The lever itself is often French. The Mouzeil maker Camac, founded in 1972 by the brothers Gérard and Joël Garnier, supplies levers to other builders: Oregon’s Thormahlen says its harps are “all fully levered with Camac levers,” and California’s Triplett says “Our sharpening levers are manufactured in France by Camac harps.”

Other American lever-harp families have taken different paths: Rees Harps moved from California to an 1881 building in Rising Sun, Indiana, in 2000 and registered the Harpsicle trademark, and Chicago’s Venus stopped building new production harps in 2018 — another American name whose workshop went quiet.

Timber law touches every harp maker. In 2017 the CITES convention brought the whole rosewood genus, Dalbergia, under its Appendix II controls; since 26 November 2019 it has exempted “finished musical instruments, finished musical instrument parts and finished musical instrument accessories,” though Brazilian rosewood stays in Appendix I. We found no source linking any maker in this round to those timbers.

Erard’s own 1811 advertisement promised that the strings produced “three distinct tones instead of two,” so that the player “can now play in every known key.” Guinness’s archive says the harp “has been synonymous with Guinness since 1862 when it was used as a symbol on the first bottle label,” and Ireland’s patent office says the state harp is excluded “from registration or use as trade marks.”

At the top of the market sit the pedal-harp makers. Chicago’s Lyon & Healy, harpmakers since 1889, has belonged since 1987 to the group founded by Victor Salvi, whose Italian factory is in Piasco, Piedmont; the New York Times described the result as “a genial global monopoly.”

Grand Junction, on Colorado’s Western Slope, was home to the workshop for more than three decades, under two families.

A founder’s name, now for sale.

Blevins’ brand was, from the start, its founder’s surname and an imaginative set of model names. Its mission line — “one at a time” — described a small workshop’s pace, and its range of double- and cross-strung harps showed an ambition beyond the usual folk lever harp. The founder’s broadcasting background, audio engineering for radio and television, gave the brand an origin story about sound.

For a design guide, Blevins is an unusual case: a heritage name explicitly offered for sale after the business closed. A name can be an asset even when the workshop is gone. Compare Stoney End, whose name passed smoothly to new owners in 2025, and Venus, a Chicago harp maker that stopped new production in 2018.

For this guide we use a canyon red and a sand with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No harp or mark is reproduced.

Keep Blevins Harps’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.