About Lester William Polsfuss

Les Paul has influenced American popular music to a great extent and he has influenced the Jazz world enormously. His coast-to-coast radio programs got him wide audience and he became a renowned jazz guitarist. Later he made multi-layered hit music for the pop market. He was influenced by Django Reinhardt at first later went on to develop his own hard-swinging style,rapid runs,repeated single notes and fluttered.He also did mixing country music, western licks and crowd pleasing effects.

Les Paul never knew how to read music notes, he had the innate intuition which made him great. George Benson, Stanley Jordon, Al DiMeola, Bucky Pizzarelli and Pat Martino are influenced by Les Paul style of Jazz.

Waukesha ditchdigger influenced  Paul to take up harmonica at the age of eight which planted the seeds of music in Pual. As a child he had few formal piano classes which where for a very short period. Paul started guitar under influence of Nick Lucas, Pie Plant Pete, Sunny Joe Wolverton and Eddie Lang. Les got the stage name Rhubarb Red. Rube Tronson's Cowboys was his first band at age of 17. He left high school to join radio band Wolverton's in St. Louis on KMOX. He did dual radio at Rhubarb Red as hillbilly act and jazz as his own interest. As Rhubarb Red he did his recording in 1936 on Montgomery Ward label. He experimented with his own type of designs for electric guitar as he was not happy with available electric guitars in those days.

 Paul formed TRIO  in 1937 and moved to New York. He got featured with Fred Warning's Pennsylvanians.  In 1941 he was nearly electrocuted  in his Queens basement during a jam session. It took a long time to his recovery and he did many radio jobs. In 1943 he moved to Hollywood, where he formed a new trio which made many V-Discs. His brilliant chase sequence along side Nat Cole in "Blues" and fleet work elsewhere  are the most spectacular reminders of his prowess as a jazzman. Bing Crosby featured Paul's Trio on his radio
shows and sponsored his recordings. In 1945 the number on hit, "It's Been a Long, Long Time." was the out come of the same collaboration. Paul made many recordings on his own, he did jazz,country and Hawaiian. Dick Haymes, Helen Forrest and the Andrews Sisters were backed by Paul.


Meanwhile, in 1947, after experimenting in his garage studio and discarding some 500 test discs, Paul came up with a kooky version of "Lover" for eight electric guitars, all played by himself with dizzying multi-speed effects. He talked Capitol Records into releasing this futuristic disc, which became a hit the following year. Alas, a bad automobile accident in Oklahoma in January 1948 put Les out of action again for a year and a half; as an alternative to amputation, his right arm had to be set at a permanent right angle suitable for guitar playing. After his recovery, he teamed up with his soon-to-be second wife, a young country singer/guitarist named Colleen Summers whom he renamed Mary Ford, and reeled off a long string of spectacular multi-layered pop discs for Capitol, making smash hits out of jazz standards like "How High the Moon" and "Tiger Rag." The hits ran out suddenly in 1955, and not even a Mitch Miller-promoted stint at Columbia from 1958 to 1963 could get the streak going again. After a bitter divorce from Ford in 1964, a gig in Tokyo the following year, and an LP of mostly remakes for London in 1967, Paul went into semi-retirement from music.


Aside from a pair of wonderfully relaxed country/jazz albums with Chet Atkins for RCA in 1976 and 1978, and a blazing duet with DiMeola on "Spanish Eyes" from the latter's 1980 Splendido Hotel CD, Paul has been long absent from the record scene (some rumored sessions for Epic in the '90s have not materialized). However, a 1991 four-CD retrospective, The Legend and the Legacy, contained an entire disc of 34 unreleased tracks, including a breathtaking electrified tribute to the Benny Goodman Sextet, "Cookin'." More significantly, Paul began a regular series of Monday night appearances at New York's Fat Tuesday's club in 1984 (from 1996, Les held court at the Iridium club across from Lincoln Center), attended by visiting celebrities and fans for whom he became an icon in the '80s. Arthritis has slowed Les' playing down in recent years, and his repertoire is largely unchanged from the '30s and '40s. But at any given gig, one can still learn a lot from the Wizard of Waukesha. ~ Richard S. Ginell, All Music Guide