Gibson Guitars: From Kalamazoo to Nashville

The guitar company whose instruments are in this city began in a workshop in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Orville Gibson was a self-taught craftsman who moved to Kalamazoo in eighteen eighty-one and spent years making mandolins and guitars by hand, applying the arched-top principles of violin making to flat instruments. In nineteen oh two, a group of businessmen bought his patents and formed the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company. Orville himself was largely sidelined by the investors who bore his name.

What followed was one of the most consequential runs in American musical instrument history. Under designer Ted McCarty in the nineteen fifties, Gibson produced the Les Paul, the SG, the Flying V, the Explorer, and the semi-hollow ES-Three Thirty-Five, instruments that would shape blues, rock, and jazz for the rest of the century. Chuck Berry, B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, and Duane Allman all built careers around Gibson instruments. The Les Paul, introduced in nineteen fifty-two with the endorsement of the jazz guitarist whose name it carries, became one of the most recognizable objects in the history of popular music.

By the nineteen seventies, the Kalamazoo plant was overcrowded. Gibson opened a Nashville manufacturing facility in nineteen seventy-five, and in nineteen eighty-three moved its corporate headquarters here entirely. Tennessee's right-to-work laws and Nashville's music-industry connections made the move logical. The Kalamazoo factory closed the following year, ending eight decades in Michigan.

Nashville's guitar factory has since produced instruments played on virtually every major stage in the world. The company went through bankruptcy in two thousand eighteen and emerged restructured, still building here. Gibson's move to Nashville was economic strategy, but the result was that the world's most famous guitar maker ended up headquartered in the city most associated with American popular music.