Les Paul:SOME POP sounds of the 1950s remind us how utterly different a musical world it was. Whatever an Elvis Presley or Bill Haley might do to drive the nails of rock'n'roll into the coffin of the show song, there would always be a Guy Mitchell or Rosemary Clooney, unaware that pop history was racing past them.
In that setting, the records of Les Paul, who has died aged 94, and his partner Mary Ford were both throwbacks to an earlier Tin Pan Alley and wittily modern. On paper, they were a competent nightclub singer and a technically superb session guitarist, reviving such faded blooms as Nola, Tiger Rag and The World is Waiting for the Sunrise. On disc, they were legion: Ford, multitracked, became a vocal group, while Paul turned into an orchestra of guitars, some twanging in the recognisable accents of country or jazz, others skittering octaves above.
Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Paul was always fascinated by sounds. At the age of nine he built a recording machine out of gramophone and car parts. As a teenage prodigy, he was billed as Red Hot Red, the Wizard of Waukesha.
By the mid-1930s he had the reputation of a versatile studio musician, working in hillbilly settings and alongside jazz artists including Louis Armstrong. He opened his own recording career in 1936 with four country songs for the Montgomery Ward mail-order store’s budget label. Later in the decade his jazz-flavoured trio – partly modelled on the ensembles of Django Reinhardt – became nationally known. He also participated in one of the earliest NBC telecasts. For most of the 1940s, he was based in Hollywood, accompanying artists such as Bing Crosby.
During this period, he developed “the log”, a solid-body electric guitar made from a piece of maple. He also conceived, with the help of the new reel-to-reel tape recorder, the effects of overdubbing, slapback echo and speed-changing, which he used in his duets with Ford, who joined him in 1947. They married in 1949 and the following year moved to New York to begin a television series, Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home.
Among their many hits were Mockingbird Hill and the chart-topping How High the Moon. In their book What Was the First Rock’n’Roll Record?, Jim Dawson and Steve Propes ascribe to How High the Moon “the first distinct rock’n’roll guitar solo”.
The Paul-Ford formula waned after the arrival of full-blown rock’n’roll, and they divorced in 1964; Ford died in 1977. Paul continued to innovate and is credited with inventing the eight-track tape recorder. The Les Paul guitar, manufactured by Gibson, came to be highly regarded.
In 1977 Paul recorded the Grammy-winning Chester and Lester with country guitar virtuoso Chet Atkins. He won a second Grammy in 2006 for the LP Les Paul Friends. In 2008 he received an American Music Masters award from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
By his first wife, Virginia Webb, Paul had two sons. By Mary Ford, he had a son and a daughter. His four children survive him, as does his companion, Arlene Palmer.
Les Paul: born June 9th, 1915; died August 13th, 2009