Les Paul - The Man, Musician and Inventor

Les Paul was born Lester William Polsfuss on June 19, 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. His family was of German ancestry. Paul's mother was related to the founders of Milwaukee's Valentin Blatz Brewing Company and the makers of the Stutz automobile. His parents divorced when he was a child. The Prussian family name was first simplified by his mother to Polfuss and then to Polfus, though Les Paul never legally changed his name. Before he took his stage name of Les Paul, he also used the stage names Red Hot Red and Rhubarb Red.

As a young boy he taught himself the harmonica, guitar and banjo. Paul was not only interested in playing the instruments but also loved to modify them. At the age of nine he built his first crystal radio. After an attempt at learning the piano, he began to play the guitar. It was during this time that he invented a neck-worn harmonica holder, which allowed him to play both sides of the harmonica hands-free while accompanying himself on the guitar. The device is still manufactured using his basic design. Paul created his first solid body electric guitar using a 2-foot piece of rail from a nearby train line, in his early teens. While playing at the Waukesha area drive-ins and roadhouses, Paul began his first experiment with sound. Wanting to make himself heard by more people at the local venues, he wired a phonograph needle to his guitar and connected it to a radio speaker, using that to amplify his acoustic guitar.

At age seventeen, Paul played with Rube Tronson's Texas Cowboys, and soon after, dropped out of high school, to team up with Sunny Joe Wolverton's Radio Band in St. Louis, Missouri, on KMOX.

Red-hot-Red.jpg (25984 bytes)Paul moved to Chicago in 1934, where he continued to perform on radio, calling himself the "Wizard of Waukesha." He met pianist Art Tatum, whose playing influenced him to a career devoted to guitar rather than his original plans of playing the piano. His first two records were released in 1936. One was credited to "Rhubarb Red", Paul's hillbilly alter ego, and the other was as an accompanist for blues-artist Georgia White. It was during this time that he began playing jazz and adopted the name of Les Paul.

Paul moved to New York in the mid 1938 and formed the Les Paul Trio. He began his stint on national radio with one of the more popular dance orchestras in the country, Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians. By the 1940s Paul had established himself in the jazz world, recording with such stars as Nat King Cole, Rudy Vallee and Kate Smith.

Tinkering with electronics and guitar amplification since his youth, Les Paul began constructing his own electric guitar in the late '30s. Unhappy with the first generation of commercially available hollowbodies because of their thin tone, lack of sustain, and feedback problems, Paul opted to build an entirely new structure. "I was interested in proving that a vibration-free top was the way to go," he has said. "I even built a guitar out of a railroad rail to prove it. What I wanted was to amplify pure string vibration, without the resonance of the wood getting involved in the sound." With the good graces of Epiphone president Epi Stathopoulo, Paul used the Epiphone plant and machinery in 1941 to bring his vision to fruition. He affectionately dubbed the guitar "The Log."

Les Paul's tireless experiments sometimes proved to be dangerous, and he nearly electrocuted himself in 1940 during a session in the cellar of his Queens apartment. During the next two years of rehabilitation, Les earned his living producing radio music. Forced to put the Pennsylvanians and the rest of his career on hold, Les Paul moved to Hollywood. During World War II, he was drafted into the Army but permitted to stay in California, where he became a regular player for Armed Forces Radio Service. By 1943 he had assembled a trio that regularly performed live, on the radio, and on V-Discs (a morale-boosting initiative involving the production of several series of recordings.) In 1944 he entered the jazz spotlight, thanks to his dazzling work filling in for Oscar Moore alongside Nat King Cole, Illinois Jacquet, and other superstars, at the first of the prestigious Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts.

Paul's influence on the music world extended far beyond the guitar. With the encouragement of Bing Crosby, with whom Paul had toured, Paul built a recording studio in his garage in his Los Angeles home in 1945. There, Paul experimented with a number of different recording techniques.

His breakthrough came in 1948 with a recording of the song "Lover," which utilized a variety of tracks. It wasn't long before Paul was creating 24-track recordings and producing hits like "How High the Moon" and "The World Is Waiting for Sunrise."

Paul’s career as a musician nearly came to an end in 1948, when he suffered a near-fatal car accident in Oklahoma, skidding off a bridge into a river during a snowstorm. The guitarist shattered his right arm and elbow, and he also broke his back, ribs, nose and collarbone. He managed to salvage his career as a musician by instructing surgeons to set his arm at an angle that would allow him to cradle and pick the guitar. It took him a year and a half to recover.

After divorcing his first wife, Virginia Webb, Paul met the former Colleen Summers, a singer who'd toured with Gene Autry's band. Paul changed her name to Mary Ford and began recording with her. They married in 1949, and for much of the 1950s the two had their own television show, "Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home."

The couple had more than three dozen hits together, all of them utilizing the recording techniques Paul had created in his studio.

In 1965, Paul went into semi-retirement, although he did return to the studio occasionally. He and Ford had divorced in December 1962. Ford died from complications associated with diabetes in 1977.

Les-Paul-Clunker-e-Mary-For.jpg (26197 bytes)The guitar that bears his name, the Gibson Les Paul, is his crowning achievement. It grew out of his desire, as a musician and inventor, to create a stringed instrument that could make electronic sound without distorting. What he came up with, after almost a decade of work, was a solid bodied guitar, one that didn’t have the deep, resonant chamber of an acoustic guitar. He referred to it as "the log." Because Gibson Guitars initially turned him down, calling his invention "a broomstick with pickups," Paul was beaten to the marketplace by Leo Fender, whose Fender Broadcaster, the first mass-produced solidbody electric guitar, was introduced in 1948. In the 1960s, the rock world embraced and adored the Gibson Les Paul. Musicians such as Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney all used the guitar. Since its debut in 1952 the Gibson Les Paul was been one of the steadiest-selling guitars made.

He is credited with many recording innovations. Although he was not the first to use the technique, his early experiments with overdubbing (also known as sound on sound), delay effects such as tape delay, phasing effects and multitrack recording were among the first to attract widespread attention.

His innovative talents extended into his playing style, including licks, trills, chording sequences, fretting techniques and timing, which set him apart from his contemporaries and inspired many guitarists of the present day.

In his later years, Paul's standing and legend in the music industry only increased. His final recorded album, "American Made, World Played," debuted in 2005 and featured, among others, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, Sting and Eric Clapton. The record also netted Paul two Grammy Awards.

The name Les Paul is synonymous with the electric guitar. As a player, inventor and recording artist, Paul had been an innovator his entire life. Paul died from complications associated with pneumonia on August 13, 2009.

On August 21, 2009, he was buried in Waukesha, Wisconsin at Prairie Home Cemetery. Paul is buried next to his mother. The two are surrounded with a brief biography of Les. A stream of visitors from around the world visit the memorial. Like his funeral in New York on August 19, the burial was private, but earlier in the day a public memorial viewing of the closed casket was held in Milwaukee at Discovery World with 1,500 attendees who were offered free admission to the Les Paul House of Sound exhibit for the day.