130TH ANNIVERSARY
Gibson, perhaps more than any other guitar maker, has a history full of interesting nooks and corners – and unanswered questions. We join two of Gibson’s top experts on the company’s history to try to shine a light on some of the more interesting ‘what ifs?’ and behind-the-scenes moves that gave us the Gibson we know today
There are guitar companies as old as Gibson but few who have made such a breadth of classic instruments – from mandolins and archtops to iconic solidbody electrics, debonair jazz guitars and sweetstrumming acoustics. So if you’ve ever struggled to get a handle on exactly how key events unfolded in over a century of guitar making by the company, you’re not alone. Indeed, the guitar-playing public would never have been privy to many of the factors that shaped the company’s evolution.
But decisions that got made in the boardrooms of the 50s and 60s and on the factory floor at Kalamazoo, and the personalities who shaped the company’s fortunes, gave us the iconic guitars we know and love today just as much as famous musicians did. That’s why we invited two of Gibson’s most knowledgeable experts on its history – vice president of product, Mat Koehler, and director of product development and Gibson archives curator, Jason Davidson – to sit down with us so we could find out everything you wanted to know about Gibson but were afraid to ask…
Gibson began life as a mandolin company, essentially. In what ways did mandolin making influence how the company went on to make guitars in your view? Mat Koehler: “Orville Gibson came up in a time where mandolins were probably the most popular stringed instrument. So, for me, the mandolins are just fundamental to the history of Gibson of being there [to serve] every major genre that developed, especially in America. Orville Gibson was an actor, too, so this theme of adapting, improvising, was part of who he was and his identity.”
Jason Davidson: “Yeah, and I think Orville was open not to just mandolins. I think Orville would have built any instrument that either came to his imagination or that was requested of him because, you know, there’s mandolins and there’s the lute that was famous on his early labels… there’s the harp guitars, there’s the traditional six-string guitars that he built – all using the same principles.”
Mat: “Yeah, supposedly the lute was actually a mandolin, but it was just shaped like a lute.”
Gibson’s trailblazing work with f-hole archtops in the 1920s was a hugely important step for the company. To what degree was L
