As for the history of the Les Paul design itself, I am not sure what story to believe. While Ted was the brains behind the overall design, he was also the president of Gibson, and a business man first and foremost. His relationship with Paul ended on a sour note when he used the Les Paul nameplate – without Paul’s permission – on what would become known as the SG.

Ted later became the mentor of Paul Reed Smith and joined PRS as a consultant, hence the similarities of PRS guitars and the Gibson Les Paul.

Although Les Paul was`an important early innovator and wonderful guitarist he was neither the inventor of the solid body electric guitar, nor was he the designer of the Gibson ‘Les Paul’.

It is almost impossible to attribute any one person as having invented the solid bodied electric since the principle had been widely understood since the early 1920s. Lloyd Loar had departed as head designer at Gibson in 1924 after quarrels over his plans to produce electric instruments. Almost certainly the first solid body electric guitar to reach commercial production was the first product of the company that became Rickenbacker, set up on the back of another quarrel, this time at National, over George Beauchamp’s design for an aluminium lap slide which entered production at the beginning of the 30s. That was a relative commercial success, and the 1935 ‘B’ series included a Spanish version as well as the lap steel.

Rickenbacker’s success encouraged others and by the end of the 1930s many manufacturers had such instruments in their catalogues. Some of these, certainly the later Rickenbackers, had fantastic sound (I owned a late 1930s Rickenbacker lap steel for many years so can speak from experience).

The Gibson ‘Les Paul’ was designed by a team headed by Ted McCarty (who holds the patent), and carries Les Paul’s name because Gibson contracted him to endorse (and use) it shortly before it went into full production – LP was shown a pre-production model. Tod McCarty’s account of the origin of the guitar in found in Tom Wheeler’s book ‘American Guitars’ (page 140) and is accepted as historically accurate.

Les Paul did contribute one feature to the original Gibson guitar, a combined bridge / trapeze of his own design (replacing the standard Gibson unit) but it was discontinued after one year when Ted McCarty designed a simpler and more effective solution.

If Ted Mccarty’s team drew on an earlier design for inspiration, it was undoubtably that of the APP, designed and built by W.O. Appleton of Burlington Iowa who had offered the design to Gibson in early 1942 although they turned him down. I don’t know how many he finally sold, but there’s a photo of one in George Gruhn and Walter Carter’s ‘Electric Guitars and Basses – a photographic history’ (page 52); it’s a beautiful instrument whose looks belie its age.