Although music didn’t die today, one of its real genius-producers did — Les Paul, dead at 94.

Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar alongside leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby.
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Mr. Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock ’n’ roll. For all his technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.
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“Honestly, I never strove to be an Edison,” he said in a 1991 interview in The New York Times. “The only reason I invented these things was because I didn’t have them and neither did anyone else. I had no choice, really.”

(Illustration found here).

Of course, from Rolling Stone magazine and the current CEO of Gibson Guitars:

“Most people, when they think of Les Paul, they think about the guitar.
Which is the most popular guitar — certainly in the Gibson line, and probably in the world.
But very few people know the inventive genius behind the scenes.
I think an appropriate title for Les would be ‘the father of modern guitar.’
Before Les Paul, the guitar was being used with amplifiers, but it was still just a loud acoustic guitar.
Les really brought the guitar into the modern age, and created the modern sound.”

And for every kid who’s picked up a pick and started strumming — So long Les!