Les Paul

Clay County Histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC

Here’s a scene I loved from Ian Port’s book The Birth of Loud. One day in 1947, three visionaries put their heads together to imagine a new instrument that didn’t really exist yet: a solid body electric guitar. Their names were Les Paul, Leo Fender, and Paul Bigsby.
This meeting and others like it occurred at the home of Les Paul. Of the three of them, Les was the only guy who actually played the guitar. Les Paul was considered by many to be the best jazz guitarist of the big band era. Les could play as fast as a supersonic jet, but ever since he was a kid growing up in Wisconsin, he was obsessed with getting LOUDER and he dreamed of electric sounds he hadn’t heard before. In the summer of 1945, Les scored a huge hit with Bing Crosby (“It’s Been a Long Long Time”) and he spent that money and notoriety on tricking out his garage to be one of the first home recording studios.
Les’ place became the hangout for glamorous celebrities and musicians…and Leo Fender. Fender was a shabby-looking obsessive workaholic who taught himself everything about electronics and radios. By the time Leo started hanging out with Les Paul, Fender was building and fixing the equipment of many musicians across southern California, most notably handling the audio for Western Swing stars Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.
One day, in 1947, Leo brought Paul Bigsby to Les’ place. Bigsby was a dashing 48-year-old former motorcycle daredevil who bragged that he could build anything. An engineer and inventor, he prided himself on his quality traditional craftsmanship. He had recently turned his attention to making better instruments for his musician friends.
The problem they faced: acoustic guitars are great for strumming around a campfire or accompanying a solo singer like Woody Guthrie or Robert Johnson, but they were just too quiet to be heard in a big concert hall, especially if you have a trumpet, clarinet, or piano playing beside you. In the 1930s, musicians invented ways to plug their guitars into an amplifier to make them louder, but there was a limit. If they cranked the volume too loud, the sound resonating inside the hollow body of the guitar would create horrific feedback noise in the electronics.
That “too loud” level was not nearly loud enough for musicians like Les Paul, the Texas Playboys, and Bigby’s buddies. Fender, Paul, and Bigsby each came to the same conclusion: instead of amplifying vibrations inside a traditional hollow guitar, the sound could be produced entirely by electricity. So why not make the body of the guitar solid wood? That way, there won’t be feedback from inside the guitar, and they could crank the volume as loud as they want.
Over the next couple years, each of the three would build innovative solid body electric guitars. Unfortunately, their comradery turned to rivalry. They stole each other’s ideas and lied about it. They felt betrayed and backstabbed. They would come to hate each other. But that would be the future. I love instead to think about a sunny California afternoon in 1947, three fellas obsessed with the same vision of something that doesn’t exist yet, trading ideas and sharing failed experiments, talking shop over beers and lemonade. The solid body electric guitar was an idea whose time had come. Someone was about to figure it out. These were the guys who did it.