The Gibson Guitar Corporation founded in 1894 in a one-room office in Kalamazoo, Michigan by Orville Gibson maker of mandolin instruments. Gibson invented archtop guitars by using the same type of carved, arched tops found on violins. By the 1930s the company was also making flattop acoustic guitarsand one of the first commercially available hollow-body electric guitars. Gibson was bought by Chicago Musical Instruments in 1944, which was acquired by the South American E.C.L. conglomerate. However due to gross corporate mismanagement Gibson closed in 1984. Several Gibson employees established Heritage Guitars in the old factory, building versions of classic Gibson designs. In January 1986 just before the company was to go out of business it was bought by businessman Juszkiewicz, Berryman and Zebrowski. The survival and success of Gibson is largely due to the change in ownership. The Memphis facility is used for semi-hollow and custom shop instruments.
A tour of Gibson's Memphis Guitar Factory is available with viewing of the facility as Gibson's skilled Luthiers craft some of the finest guitars in the world. You see the intricate process of binding, neck-fitting, painting, buffing, and tuning that creates these musical instruments. Absolutely no photography is allowed in the factory. In 2011-2012 the factories in Memphis and Nashville were raided by U.S. Fish and Wildlife agents with suspicion that wood used in some of its guitars was illegally cut and shipped from Madagascar.
Beale Street in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee is significant in the city's history, as well as in the history of the blues. The blues clubs and restaurants that line Beale Street are major tourist attractions in Memphis. Festivals and outdoor concerts bring large crowds to the street and its surrounding areas.
Around 1880 Robert Church, first black millionaire from the south, purchased land around Beale Street. In 1899 he paid the city to create Church Park with a 2,000 seat auditorium at the corner of 4th and Beale. It became a recreational and cultural center, where blues musicians could gather. Some of the famous speakers in the Church Park Auditorium were Woodrow Wilson, Booker T. Washington, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In 1903 while looking for a music teacher for his Knights of Pythias Band Mayor Thornton called Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute. Washington recommended a trumpet player in Clarksdale, Mississippi, W. C. Handy. Memphis became the home of this famous musician who created the "Blues on Beale Street".
From the 1920s to the 1940s, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Memphis Minnie, B. B. King, Rufus Thomas, Rosco Gordon and other blues and jazz legends played on Beale Street and helped develop the style known as Memphis Blues. As a young man, B.B. King was billed as "the Beale Street Blues Boy".
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