The Banjo Guru

No brand name looms larger in the bluegrass banjo world than Gibson.  The company’s story goes back to the late 1800s when a young man named Orville Gibson, son of an English immigrant, moved from his native New York to the rapidly-growing industrial town of Kalamazoo, Michigan (“Yes”, said the Kalamazoo Chamber of Commerce in a 1980s publicity campaign, “There Really Is a Kalamazoo”).  Although Orville worked a variety of odd jobs to support himself, he was a musician and luthier with radical ideas about instrument construction.  The mandolin was the most popular fretted instrument of the day, and Orville’s vision was to apply the same principles of carving and top graduation to the mandolin that Stradivarius and his contemporaries had employed in building their legendary violins. 

Orville’s creations were a dramatic departure from the round-back “tater bug” mandolin, with its flat top and its back formed out of narrow strips of bent wood.  A group of Kalamazoo investors saw money to be made in marketing Orville’s designs to the mandolin-buying public and the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company was formed in 1902.  Always an enigmatic figure, Orville appears to have had limited involvement with the Gibson company after its first few years.  The Gibson company refined and built on Orville’s ideas and responded to the increasing popularity of the tenor banjo by producing its first banjo in 1918—the same year that Orville died back home in New York. 

After some initial stumbling in search of the right design, by the late 1920s Gibson was a dominant force in the 4-string tenor banjo market.  The company also made a precious few “old-timey” 5-string banjos, primarily for the rural Southern market; it was one of these banjos that Earl Scruggs would use in the years immediately following World War II to develop a new style of picking for bluegrass music.  Despite changes in ownership and a relocation from Kalamazoo to Nashville, Tennessee, Gibson banjo production has continued to the current day.  Since the late 1980s, the company’s banjo output has consisted largely of reissues of its classic models of the 1920s and 1930s.