Surprising Discoveries

 

How strange to see, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Les Paul’s Gibson guitar. Les Paul was American.

Vaya con dios, he used to sing, when I was 14, when I loved the songs of true and star-crossed love. He sang with his wife, Mary. Les Paul and Mary Ford. How tenderly they sang! Entranced, I clutched my heart.

How neat and clean they looked in photos. That was the norm, back then. Even the jazzmen wore suits to perform. He was a jazz and blues singer; country too.

I find out now, new, he was also a luthier – what a beautiful word! – ‘a craftsman who makes stringed instruments (as lutes or guitars or violins).’ He made, of course, guitars. An inventor, he made ‘the log,’ a solid-body electric guitar which became the Gibson Les Paul. 

His innovations in over-dubbing (I find out so late) paved the way for rock’n’roll. Did Les Paul help to give us Elvis?

(Elvis, who was all rebellion. Long hair, skinny pants, wild dance. He too could be tender, but not at first. You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, he sang when I was 17. I was less enchanted then by melancholy love, more enamoured of fire.)

Rest well, Les Paul – living into the 21st Century, dying in 2009, aged 94. Thank you. May God go with you.

NaPoWriMo Day Eleven.

Also written for Friday Writings #172  at Poets and Storytellers United: 'Prose, Poetry, or Both At Once?' Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to mix prompts. Had I stuck solely to NaPo, I'd have tried a villanelle. For P&SU, while incorporating aspects of the NaPo prompt, I essayed a prose poem. We could choose a prose poem or a piece of poetic prose. This is certainly not poetic prose! Not nearly beautiful enough. I fear it might be simply a piece of prose. But I did try to make it a prose poem, with cadence, rhythm, and sound.