Junior high

From innocent beginnings as a student guitar, the Les Paul Junior became a raw-toned rock ’n’ roll tool par excellence. We reveal how it grew up to become a monster tone machine, among many other things…

Ayear or so after Gibson introduced its first solidbody electric, the Les Paul Goldtop, the top brass had a meeting. The company’s historian, Julius Bellson, rummaged in the archives and found that, back in 1938, electric guitars made up no more than 10 per cent of Gibson guitar sales – the rest were all acoustics. He told the meeting that the proportion had risen to 15 per cent by 1940, to 50 per cent by 1951, and that now – in 1953 – electric guitars made up 65 per cent of the company’s total guitar sales. The buoyant Goldtop must have helped considerably in this. Naturally, it didn’t take long for the meeting to agree that Gibson would be foolish not to create more Les Paul models.

This was a standard way of working: to create a market and, if it took off, diversify with similar products at different pricepoints. Gibson had been doing similar things since at least 1920, when it had launched the Style L Junior, a budget version of the L-1 acoustic archtop. A Gibson catalogue from 1925 said it offered “to discriminating guitar players, the lowest-priced guitar in the world to combine the truly essential features of a good guitar,” adding that the Junior “will give you practically all that is desirable in a Gibson, lacking only some of those refinements, which at present you may feel you cannot afford”.

Now, in 1950s America, cheap electrics for starting-out players had begun to appear from brands such as Kay, Danelectro, National and Harmony. Those same companies also supplied cheapies to mail-order companies, who used their own brands, such as Silvertone (Sears, Roebuck) and Airline (Montgomery Ward). Gibson had done it with hollowbody electrics, too, but now it was time to try the same idea, making several tiers of price-pointed models, for the new and popular solidbody guitars. Gibson boss Ted McCarty once explained it: “You have all kinds of players who like this and like that. Chevrolet had a whole bunch of models; Ford had a whole bunch of models. So did we.”

The first wave of the new Les Pauls came in 1954, with the arrival of the Custom and Junior. The Custom was the upmarket one, looking classy with its all-black finish and gold-plated hardware. But the one we’re interested in was the budget Junior, which did not pretend to be anything other than a cheaper guitar. It was obvious that Gibson was making it to a price: a pricelist dated September 1954 showed the Custom at $325, the Goldtop at $225, and the Junior at $99.50.

The spec told a similar story: the Junior’s shape made it clearly a Les Paul, but its simple, solid mahogany body had a flat top, where the Goldtop had a refined carved