Les Paul & Mary Ford Biography

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Les Paul & Mary Ford
Pop Music | 3 CD Set
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Guitarist Les Paul (Lester Polfus) helped set popular music on a new course years ago. His excellent playing almost faded into the background compared with what he came to be known for in music. What he did was design the first solid-body guitar and when the Gibson guitar company made it for him (at his expense), the firm had so little confidence in Paul that it kept the company name off it - at first. The Gibson Les Paul guitar eventually became one of the company's biggest setters. And he was a pioneer early in multi-track recordings, overdubbing voice and instrument until they sounded like a choir of singers and/or an orchestra of guitars. Born in 1916 in Wisconsin, Paul took up the guitar early in life and by his teenage years was on the radio in Chicago before moving to New York and then to Los Angeles. His recording career early included backup work for the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby and others but his versatility put him in a variety of musical settings, including country and jazz; he was in an early Jazz At the Philharmonic concert (1944), a series that went on for years and helped introduce concert jazz to a larger audience, and he won the Downbeat Magazine guitar slot in its annual reader poll 1951-53. Never completely immersed in one style, Paul made a name for himself in country, too, which in the '70s put him in the recording studio with fellow guitarist Chet Atkins ("Chester and Lester"). Meanwhile, he had earlier set up a studio in his garage and began to experiment with multi-tracking. With singer Mary Ford (b. 1928 - d.1977), whom he married in 1949, he created new renditions of older music and soon was selling millions of records, including "Lover," "Nola," "How High The Moon," "Brazil," "The World Is Waiting For the Sunrise" and many others. "Hummingbird" was the highest pop-charted Paul song, reaching No. 7 on the Billboard in 1955. Retiring from recording in the '60s, he went on to design and promote Gibson guitars, recorded with Atkins in the '70s and, after a TV documentary on his life in 1980, returned to performing, appearing in 1992 at a guitar festival in Seville, Spain.

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