Gibson Guitar: From Kalamazoo to Nashville

The guitar you hear on more American recordings than almost any other instrument was born in a one-room workshop in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the eighteen nineties. Orville Gibson was a self-taught luthier with an obsession: he believed the guitar and the mandolin were being built wrong. Every other maker was pressing and bending flat sheets of wood into shape. Orville carved his tops and backs the way violin makers did, arching them from a solid piece of wood so the instrument itself could breathe and resonate. He patented his mandolin design in eighteen ninety-eight and, in nineteen oh two, a group of businessmen bought his patent rights and formed the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company. Orville Gibson sold the rights for twenty-five hundred dollars and a small monthly stipend. He died in a sanitarium in nineteen eighteen, largely forgotten.

The company he launched kept building. Through the twenties and thirties, Gibson's archtop guitars became the instruments of jazz. In nineteen fifty-two, Gibson president Ted McCarty partnered with guitarist and inventor Les Paul to introduce the Les Paul Model, a solid-body electric guitar with a carved maple top that drew directly on Orville's violin heritage. That guitar, in the hands of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Slash, would become one of the most recognizable objects in rock and roll history.

Gibson moved its manufacturing to Nashville in nineteen seventy-five when the Kalamazoo factory was overcrowded, and relocated its headquarters here entirely in nineteen eighty-three. Tennessee's right-to-work laws and proximity to the music industry made the move permanent. After nearly a century in Michigan, Gibson was a Nashville company now. The plant on Elm Hill Pike turned out Les Pauls and ES three-three-fives for decades before Gibson opened its Gibson Garage showroom in downtown Nashville in twenty twenty-one, a forty-thousand-square-foot shrine to the guitar directly across from Bridgestone Arena. The castle may have moved, but the carved tops are still Orville's idea.