Gibson guitar maker sees future with bankruptcy protection
NASHVILLE, TENN. —
Gibson guitars have been such a fixture in music history that Chuck Berry was laid to rest with his, B.B. King affectionately named his “Lucille,” and Eric Clapton borrowed one from George Harrison to play the solo on the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
The maker of the iconic instrument, a constant across generations of American music, filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday after wrestling for years with debt. The decision came with an assurance from Gibson that it will refocus on its specialty, musical instruments, and move away from its debtplagued push to sell home electronics.
In the hands of musicians from Jimmy Page to Duane Allman and Slash, Gibson’s electric guitars have been a foundational element of blues and rock.
Legendary jazz guitar player Charlie Christian made history playing a Gibson ES-150 — one of the first ever electric guitars — through an amplifier with the Benny Goodman orchestra. The later big-bodied Gibson jazz guitars have been in the arsenal of many great players since then, such as Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass.
“It’s hard to name any guitar players who play electric or steel-string acoustics who don’t own a Gibson,” said George Gruhn of Gruhn Guitars, a world-famous vintage instrument store in Nashville.
One of the only known photographs of iconic Delta blues pioneer Robert Johnson shows him with a Gibson L-1 guitar.
And the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s wouldn’t have sounded quite so mellow without battalions of steel-string Gibson acoustic guitars among the Martins and Guilds.
Elvis Presley didn’t start out with a Gibson but he went on to own and play many of them, according to the website for Graceland, his Memphis home.