Dave Hunter - The Gibson Les Paul: The Illustrated Story of the Guitar That Changed Rock

Other acoustic-guitar makers were producing excellent instruments in the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but right from its inception in the 1890s, Gibson was unique among them. All on his own, in a cramped backroom workshop in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Orville H. Gibson invented the archtop guitar. Consider that all such guitars of the past 120 years built to any approximation of that templatenot only by Gibson but also by Epiphone, Gretsch, DAngelico, Stromberg, Guild, Benedetto, and so many othersowe an eternal debt to Orville Gibsons creation, and his achievement comes into even keener focus.

Little is known of Orville H. Gibsons early life, other than that he was born in 1856 to British immigrant John W. Gibson and his wife Amy on a farm in upstate New York, and that he traveled west to Kalamazoo, Michigan, at the age of twenty-five. Even in the early 1880s, and before, Michigan represented a West that promised opportunity and the chance for an entrepreneur to make his own wayshades of the boom times that would make nearby Detroit a world industrial power some years later. Kalamazoo itself was technically no more than a village at the time of Orvilles arrival, albeit a big one, and one that would rapidly grow toward town and even city status.

According to Walter Carters very informative book Gibson Guitars: 100 Years of an American Icon (General Publishing Group, 1994), Orville took a variety of jobs while apparently working toward his dream of building musical instruments. Positions as a clerk in a shoe store and at Butters Restaurant saw him through the mid-1880s and early 1890s, but by the mid-1890s the aspiring instrument maker had established a functioning workshop and was already on his way to making guitar history.

While we cant know exactly how or where Orville Gibson got his notions for guitar and mandolin making, we do know they established an original and even revolutionary new form in the industry. Basing his construction on that of the violin, he carved the tops and backs of his instruments from solid wood, following the theory that the strength of the arched, solid tops allowed the soundboards to vibrate more freely, requiring, as they did, fewer and lighter supporting elements. While these theories evolved into the renowned Gibson archtop guitars, mandolins were a far bigger craze in Orvilles day, and his early developments in instrument making arguably had an even biggeror at least more directimpact on that world. His carved-top A-style and F-style mandolins gained attention quickly and remain far and away the two standards in the industry, nearly 120 years later.

Even so, Orvilles archtop guitars were a major part of the burgeoning lineup, and the entire range of Gibson instruments earned a stellar reputation surprisingly quickly in that slower-paced age. Having been established in his instrument-making workshop for little more than half a decade, in 1902 Orville was courted by a group of Kalamazoo businessmenincluding John W. Adams, Leroy Hornbeck, Sylvo Reams, Samuel H. Van Horn, and Lewis A. Williamswho sought to invest in the venture. Contracts agreed and signed by the end of the year established the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company, Limited, with its namesake as a consultant, while also paying Orville himself $2,500 (a whopping sum at the time) for the rights to the Gibson name. However, while the groups backing clearly helped Gibson to grow, and saw an acceleration in the brands uptake among musicians, it seems also to have signaled the decline of Orvilles own involvement in his creations.

In 1911, after a few years of apparent ill health signaled by occasional hospital stays, Orville returned to upstate New York in the care of a doctor. All accounts indicate that he had largely abandoned his involvement in the Gibson company years before. In his brief biography of Orville, David K. Bradford writes, the small amount of stock he owned in the company was sold to a local saloonkeeper within six months of the companys formation after a falling out with the management (19thcenturyguitar.com, 2009). Although little is known of Orvilles personal life or his history after the formation of the Gibson company, Bradford also states that the founder of this burgeoning guitar empire was considered eccentric and probably suffered from mental illness. On August 21, 1918, after several more stays in the hospital, Orville H. Gibson died. He was buried in Morningside Cemetery in Malone, New York.