The H77 was about as fancy a guitar as could be expected from a budget brand.

Harmony catalogs touted it as having “maximum electronics”, and each of the three DeArmond pickups had it’s own tone and volume controls plus it’s own on/off switch – giving it more versatility than any Gibson three-pickup guitar ever had.

The H77 represented the last shining moment in Harmony’s long history as one of America’s leading makers of budget-priced instruments. The company has typically been grouped with Kay as a victim of cheap Japanese imports in the 1960s, but the turning point for Harmony was actually the death in 1968 of longtime owner Jay Kraus, who had bought Harmony from the giant Sears Roebuck catalog company in 1940. After Kraus’s death, the company bought several distributors in an attempt to secure it’s market base.

Although sales of guitars remained respectable – even in the face of Japanese imports – the expansion attempt stretched the company’s finances to breaking point. That point came in 1974, and Harmony’s assets were sold at auction.