‘The brand name and company’s reputation for making guitars is tarnished, but not dead by any means, and it’s very much capable of being resuscitated,’ Gruhn said.
In the hands of musicians from B.B. King to Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Duane Allman and Slash, Gibson’s electric guitars have been a foundational element of blues and rock. King’s signature guitar, ‘Lucille,’ was a Gibson.
Legendary jazz guitar player Charlie Christian made history playing a Gibson ES-150 – one of the first ever electric guitars – through an amplifier with the Benny Goodman orchestra.
The later big-bodied Gibson jazz guitars have been in the arsenal of many great players since then, such as Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass.
One of the only known photographs of iconic Delta blues pioneer Robert Johnson shows him with a Gibson L-1 guitar.
And the folk-revival of the 1950s and 1960s wouldn’t have sounded quite so mellow without battalions of steel-string Gibson acoustic guitars among the Martins and Guilds.
In 1952, the company enlisted the services of popular recording artist Les Paul to introduce his namesake signature guitar. Les Paul remains one of the most familiar names in guitar models today.
Elvis Presley didn’t start out with a Gibson but owned and played many of them, according to the website for Graceland, his Memphis home.
Eric Clapton played the solo on the Beatles’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ on a Gibson guitar he borrowed from George Harrison, according to GuitarWorld.com.
And Jimmy Page, the legendary guitarist for blues rockers Led Zeppelin, was and remains a longtime Gibson loyalist.
‘It’s hard to name any guitar players who play electric or steel-string acoustics who don’t own a Gibson,’ said Gruhn, the Nashville guitar expert.
Credits: dailymail.co.uk
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