Buyer’s Guide
1959 Les Paul Junior
Dan Orkin of Reverb.com reveals how deep you’ll need to dig to get your hands on the king of beginner’s guitars
The story of how the Gibson Les Paul Standard transitioned from Goldtop to Burst to SG in the late 1950s has been recounted in countless guitar articles and books over the years. While somewhat less coveted by modern collectors, the Les Paul Customs of the same vintage – with their deep black beauty styling and pinstripe panache – can lay claim to a similar status and story.
If you jump down a bit in the scale of vintage Les Paul-named guitars from the 50s, though, you’ll find a significantly less vaunted pair of guitars: the Les Paul Special and Les Paul Junior. Lacking the carved tops and humbucker pickups of their upscale counterparts, these models have never been anywhere near the level of a Standard or Custom as far as value or reputation, but they experienced their own design evolution going from a single cutaway to double and eventually SG-style body design. And while usually cast as punk rock underdogs (as cemented by their use by Joan Jett, Paul Westerberg, Billie Joe Armstrong and others) these guitars were made of old growth mahogany that went through the Kalamazoo factory, earning them an undeniable vintage mystique.
The 1959 edition of the Les Paul Junior (which came standard in Cherry Red) is perhaps the least coveted of the heap. With just one P-90 pickup and a short-lived double-cutaway ‘slab’ body, this design lacks much of what most players would consider makes a Les Paul a Les Paul. That said, for anyone looking for an entryway to the purported magic of a piece of 50s Gibson solid body machinery, a ’59 Junior may be just the ticket.
Junior Pricing
On today’s market, Cherry Red Les Paul Juniors from 1959 tend to sell for around £2,600 to £3,600 for guitars in good, original condition. Some more pristine specimens might sell for more than that. One especially fine Cherry ‘59 Junior sold this year on Reverb.com for $8,000, which represents the top-end of the market at present. Some TV Yellow models can sell for more than that too, with some clearing the $10,000 mark.
Digging through our historical sales data, there is certainly no lack of guitars at the other end of the scale, with all manner of bruises, repairs and swapped parts. The basic construction and single pickup design of the Les Paul Junior seems to invite a certain willingness to mod and augment these guitars, taking many extant examples out of that original condition classification. Guitars in this ‘player grade’ bucket might sell for as low as £1,300.
Alternative Buying Options
Like most 50s Gibsons, there have been no shortage of latter-day reissues and revisions of the Les Paul Junior over the years, leaving today’s buyer with a wide range of options to weigh if opting for a Gibson or Epiphone model. Custom Shop Gibsons sit at the top of the pile, with prices for some of these couture recreations sitting in a similar range to the vintage equivalents. While the single cutaway Junior design is more common, there have been some double-cut models produced at different points.
Outside of Gibson, Hamer has produced a number of instruments with a similar double-cut body shape including the current Hamer Special Junior. In the boutique realm, the Collings 290 DC S strikes a decidedly Junior format, as does the Gustavsson Bluesmaster Junior.