![]() asked me what I wanted, and I just spurted out ‘gold’ as if I’d been rehearsing it. “That’s All Right” and “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” When Gibson finally changed its corporate mind and hustled to catch up with that upstart Leo Fender, Paul remembers Berlin telling him that they would put his name on the solidbody and build it to his specifications. Throughout the late 1940s and early ’50s, he hounded Gibson to produce a solidbody electric guitar based on his own homebuilt “Log” – “the broomstick with the pickups on it,” as he remembers CMI-Gibson president Maurice H. Inspiration for production of the ES-295 came once again from Paul’s helping hand. Les Paul, though, didn’t see it that way, and indeed had an appreciation for things most people couldn’t comprehend. Spraying a perfectly good 175 in gold paint was either sacrilegious or just downright silly, depending on your point of view. Nothing more came of that one-off golden guitar. ![]() His wife received the guitar and sent it back to me with a letter explaining the vet’s passing.” “Well, the guitar arrived, but the vet never saw it. There was no publicity intended it was just a gift. He said he would make it and ship it directly to the hospital. I called Ted McCarty at Gibson immediately and said I needed a guitar right now – take an ES-175 and paint it gold. “In the hallway, the doctor told me that his case was terminal and he probably wouldn’t last one week. “I told him that I would have a guitar made for him – any kind he liked. “I asked him what song he wanted to hear and he picked a difficult one in the key of F# – ‘Just One More Chance.’ I turned my amp way up and I tapped out the chords with just one hand on the fretboard. “I said, ‘It is possible to play with one hand,’ and told him of my car accident and how I had my arm cast in plaster so I could still play. He said, ‘I am a guitar player, but I’ll never play again because I am paralyzed down one side of my body.’ ![]() “One vet, Dean Davis, had his head all bandaged up from a brain-tumor operation, and he was propped up so he could see us. I was playing my Epiphone ‘Clunker,’ and Mary sang. ![]() We would carry our guitars and amps from room to room. “Mary Ford and I were playing at Wood Hospital, in Milwaukee, for injured war veterans. In 1951, he asked Gibson to spray one of its ES-175 models in gold lacquer for an ailing World War II veteran who was a fellow fretter. Then, along came this audacious archtop at a time when guitars were only supposed to be au naturel or painted with a funky “sunburst.” Whoever played a gold-colored guitar was just asking for trouble!Īs with many things in the guitar universe, it was Les Paul who sparked the development of the ES-295. “To me, that hollowbody ES-295 enhanced Elvis’ voice better than anything else I could have used.”Īt the time, Gibson’s guitars were for big-band jazz, Fender’s for country and western, and pedal steels were hot sellers. “There were just three of us in the band, with Bill Black keeping time on his bass, and when Elvis wasn’t singing, I was all there was. “All I did with my guitar was try to enhance what Elvis was doing,” he said. Moore believes that his choice of the ES-295 was essential to the sound of Elvis’ early rock and roll. In retrospect, it was the perfect choice in an era when men wore gray-flannel suits, Betty Crocker was the homemaker’s heroine, and tail fins on cars were merely a gleam in some designer’s eyes. Though Gibson never planned it, Moore’s Gibson ES-295 (serial number A-12290) became the first rock and roll guitar, its fancy gold finish as outrageous as the music it suddenly represented. Moore’s ES-295 can be heard on Elvis’ first four Sun singles, including “That’s All Right” and “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” That guitar – or at least the sound it made – on Presley’s first four Sun singles, make it one of the most famous guitars in rock and roll, except for one thing very few fans knew what it was. ![]() Like a hound dog hit by lightning, the first notes of rock and roll blasted out of radios across the country in July of 1954, courtesy of Elvis Presley’s supercharged-hillbilly singing on “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon Of Kentucky,” backed by Scotty Moore’s guitar. Photo: Jay Thompson, courtesy Steve Bonner/. Scotty Moore and his ES-295 onstage with Elvis in 1955. ![]()
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