A drumhead tannery before a drum company.

Rogers began as a drumhead business, not a drum maker. The company’s own timeline says Joseph H. Rogers founded what it calls America’s first calfskin drumhead company at Brewster’s Station, New York, in 1849, and that a second tannery followed in Farmingdale, New Jersey, run by his son Joseph H. Rogers Jr. English Wikipedia names the founder as James Rogers, an Irish immigrant from Dublin, so the sources differ on his first name. The collector site Vintage Drum Guide dates the Farmingdale tannery to 1909 and describes it as a small family operation with three or four staff.

Drums came with the third generation. The company says the grandson, Cleveland S. Rogers, began making the first Rogers drums at Farmingdale in 1930. Vintage Drum Guide places the first catalogued drums in 1938, when the firm sold drums that looked much like Gretsch models but carried Rogers heads and badges, and says a machine shop added in 1939 closed in 1945. English Wikipedia says these early drums were assembled from other makers’ shells and hardware.

The turning point was a sale to a distributor. The company says Cleveland Rogers sold the business to Henry Grossman in 1955 and that Grossman moved Joseph Rogers Inc. to Covington, Ohio. Other sources put the deal earlier: Vintage Drum Guide, citing Rob Cook’s The Rogers Book, describes a quiet start in Covington in 1952, and English Wikipedia’s article on Grover Musical Products dates Grossman’s ownership of Rogers from 1953. The Grossman family’s Cleveland music business had also bought the Grover tuner business in 1952, the same article says, so the drum maker and the tuner maker shared an owner.

Thompson, Strauss and the Covington years.

The company calls 1956 to 1965 its “Covington Era” and its golden age, crediting Grossman’s direction, the inventor Joe Thompson and the marketing manager Ben Strauss. Its best-known product is the Dyna-Sonic snare drum, made from about 1961, according to English Wikipedia. Its snare wires sit in a floating cradle, so their tension can be set separately from the pressure that holds them against the bottom head. Most Dyna-Sonics had chrome-over-brass shells, and only a small number had wooden ones, the company says.

Hardware mattered as much as drums. Thompson’s Swiv-o-Matic line of pedals, hi-hats, cymbal stands and tom holders used a ball-and-socket tilter, and the company says drummers who endorsed other brands, including Ringo Starr, Mitch Mitchell and John Bonham, used pieces of it. Wikipedia says the later Memriloc hardware of 1976, co-developed by Dave Donoho and Roy Burns, was copied by most other makers; Yamaha’s 2006 announcement made a similar point about the Rogers “memory lock” system. Endorsers named by the company and by Yamaha include Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson, Cozy Cole and Ed Shaughnessy.

Corporate owners followed. The New York Times reported on 5 April 1966 that CBS had made a deal for Rogers; Wikipedia says production moved to Fullerton, California, in 1969. In Britain, Wikipedia adds, Rogers drums were made under licence by Ajax, with Rogers hardware on Ajax shells.

Hardware as identity.

These seven brands fall into two camps: old American names that have passed through several owners, and small workshops that build drums by hand. Rogers began in 1849 as a drumhead maker in New York state; DRUM! Magazine reported in 2018 that the name is owned by Reliance Musical, a Taiwanese manufacturer, with drums finished in California. Slingerland, founded by H. H. Slingerland in 1912, according to English Wikipedia, was bought from Gibson by Drum Workshop in 2019, and its website says DW is now part of Roland.

Leedy, started in Indianapolis in 1897 by Ulysses G. Leedy, passed to C. G. Conn and then Slingerland; English Wikipedia says Gretsch has held the trademark since 1986 and the brand has lain largely dormant. Noble & Cooley is the exception among the old names: founded in Granville, Massachusetts, in 1854, its team page now lists Nick Jones, a seventh-generation Cooley descendant, and John Keane as owners, its site says it is part of York Creative Collective, and it says its drums are handcrafted in the USA.

The boutique makers are younger. Craviotto, founded by the drummer Johnny Craviotto, says it has made one-ply solid-shell drums since 2004 and now handcrafts them in Nashville. C&C, founded by Bill Cardwell, builds drums at its shop in Gladstone, Missouri, and says it has made its own shells since 2010.

Sakae is the outlier: an Osaka maker established in 1925 that, DRUM! reported, built Yamaha’s top-tier drums for 40 years. It suspended business in 2018, Kyodo reported; DRUM! later reported that Korg had bought the trademark, and the name now appears on drums sold as Sakae Osaka Heritage.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From CBS to a Taiwanese owner.

The original business did not survive the 1980s. DRUM! magazine wrote in 2017 that Rogers production was discontinued in that decade, and Wikipedia says that after CBS sold Fender and Rogers to a group of Fender managers, the new owners dropped the drum line. The name then passed through several hands. Wikipedia says the Dallas retailer Brook Mays Music Company acquired it in 1998 for an import line sold in its own stores; the Rogers timeline gives 1999. After Brook Mays filed for Chapter 11 on 11 July 2006, Yamaha Corporation of America announced that it had bought the Rogers intellectual property at auction, and its vice president Tom Sumner promised to “improve on the Rogers legacy.”

The present revival belongs to a manufacturer. DRUM! reported in 2018 that the name is owned by Reliance, a Taiwanese firm that builds drums and components for other companies and also owns Dixon, and that the project began in 2016 under its brand director, Ken Fredenberg. Rogers USA started with replacement parts, announced a reborn wood-shell Dyna-Sonic in November 2017 and followed it with the Dyno-Matic pedal, a re-creation of the Swiv-o-Matic. The new snare was modelled on the rare wooden original rather than the common brass one, with ten lugs, shells of North American hardwood and the floating snare rail, in 14 by 5 and 14 by 6.5 inch sizes and finishes including White Marine Pearl and Black Diamond Pearl, DRUM! reported. Components were built in Asia and, DRUM! found on a factory visit, finished by Bill Detamore’s Porkpie Drums in Canoga Park, California. Reliance’s brand page still lists Rogers, Big Bang Distribution handles it in the US, and the company says its Covington Series kits are built in the USA.

For a design guide, Rogers shows how much a drum brand can carry in its hardware: the script logo, the oval badge and the clock-face throw-off were all named in the 2017 relaunch. Compare the Ludwig and Gretsch Drums guides. For this guide we use script black, chrome, marine pearl and ripple red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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