Grooving on Gibson

Lucille began life as acoustic archtop L-30 with an added pickup. She got her name in a nightclub in Twist, Ark., in 1949, when two men slugging it out over a woman named Lucille started a fire. B.B. King risked his life running into the burning club to save the guitar, and then named it to remind himself never to do something that stupid again. Over the years, Lucille evolved into an ES-5 and various ES-355s, before she became the B.B. King Lucille, introduced by Gibson in 1984 and still in production.

Hers is just one of the stories of hundreds of guitars—and their players—chronicled in The Gibson Electric Guitar Book, by Nashville songwriter and music historian Walter Carter (Backbeat Books, 160 pp., $24.95). The products of Nashville-based Gibson, Carter writes, contributed to the distinctive sounds of performers as varied as Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Chet Atkins, Duane Allman and Bob Marley. Even bands that weren’t always pictured with Gibson guitars, such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, used them in the studio on some of their most influential recordings. It was a hand-painted Gibson, for example, in bed with John and Yoko during their famous “Give Peace a Chance” recording.

Carter, a former company historian for Gibson and the author of several previous books on guitars, has assembled a truly comprehensive and lovingly illustrated compendium of virtually every model, from the 1937 ES-150 through the many incarnations of the rock staple Les Paul, to the Flying V’s that anchored many a 1980s hair band. He portrays not just the artists who used the guitars, but also the craftsmen who designed them and the businessmen who kept the company alive in lean times when it appeared certain to close.

The level of detail is sufficient to make this book required reading for anyone planning to attend a club or cocktail party within the Nashville city limits, where guitar picks seem to be issued with the first pacifier. While the bulk of the book focuses on classic guitars, Carter also includes models introduced as recently as 2007 and used by 21st century bands such as Fall Out Boy and Wolfmother.

The knowledge assembled in this book can make any guitar enthusiast as hot as Lucille on that memorable night in 1949.