Les Paul, Guitarist, Inventor & Inspiration To Many Rockers, Has Died

Les Paul, the jazz guitarist who became a rock 'n' roll legend for the electric guitar he designed, has died. He was 94.

The Associated Press reports that Gibson Guitar Co., which manufactures the Les Paul model that has been used by rockers including Pete Townshend of The Who, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and Duane Allman, says he died today of complications from pneumonia at White Plains (N.Y.) Hospital.

The AP writes that:

As an inventor, Paul helped bring about the rise of rock 'n' roll and multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the "tracks" in the finished recording.

With Mary Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records and 11 No. 1 pop hits, including Vaya Con Dios, How High the Moon, Nola and Lover. Many of their songs used overdubbing techniques that Paul the inventor had helped develop.

Paul was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. It says that:

The guitar that bears his name — the Gibson Les Paul — is his crowning achievement. It grew out of his desire, as a musician and inventor, to create a stringed instrument that could make electronic sound without distorting. What he came up with, after almost a decade of work, was a solid bodied instrument — that is, one that didn't have the deep, resonant chamber of an acoustic guitar.

As he told writer Jim O'Donnell, "What I wanted to do is not have two things vibrating. I wanted the string to vibrate and nothing else. I wanted the guitar to sustain longer than an acoustical box and have different sounds than an acoustical box." The fact that the guitar's body was solid allowed for the sound of a plucked string to sustain, as its vibrating energy was not dissipated in a reverberant acoustic chamber.

Here's a little sample of Paul's playing:

I had the chance to hear Paul speak at the Smithsonian a decade or so ago. His stories of the old days in radio and his inventions were fascinating. Each week for years, I would see in The New Yorker's Night Life listings that at the club Iridium in Manhattan, "Mondays belong to the electric-guitar innovator Les Paul." And I would think about how good it would be to see his show there sometime. Now, there are only his recordings to fall back on.

Update at 12:42 p.m. ET. Gibson has now posted online a lengthy statement/obituary. It says that:

The Gibson Les Paul model — the most powerful and respected electric guitar in history — began with the 1952 release of the Les Paul Goldtop. After introducing the original Les Paul Goldtop in 1952, Gibson issued the Black Beauty, the mahogany-topped Les Paul Custom, in 1954. The Les Paul Junior (1954) and Special (1955) were also introduced before the canonical Les Paul Standard hit the market in 1958. With revolutionary humbucker pickups, this sunburst classic has remained unchanged for the half-century since it hit the market.

And here's some more of the Les Paul sound:

Weekend Edition profiled Paul in 2005: