Star Guitars: 101 Guitars That Rocked the World

These are the guitars so famous that their names are often household words: B. B. King’s Lucille, Eric Clapton’s Blackie, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s First Wife, Billy F Gibbons’ Pearly Gates, Neil Young’s Old Black, and many more. Here’s the first-ever illustrated history of the actual guitars of the stars that made the music.

            Other best-selling guitar histories look at the rank-and-file models, but this book is unique in profiling the actual “star guitars”—the million-dollar babies, such as the 1968 Stratocaster that Jimi Hendrix burned at Woodstock, which sold at Sotheby’s auction house in 1993 for $1,300,000. Amateurs buy guitars to emulate the stars—Clapton’s Strat, Slash’s Les Paul—and this book explains the stars’ modifications, thus showing how others can recreate those famous tones.

Dave Hunter is an author, musician, and journalist. He is the author of several popular books about guitars, amps, and effects, including Star Guitars and 365 Guitars, Amps & Effects You Must Play, as well as Fender: 75 Years and Fender Stratocaster: 70 Years. A regular contributor to Guitar Player and Vintage Guitar magazines, he resides in Kittery, Maine.

Billy F Gibbons, co-founder and lead guitarist of ZZ Top, is also a renowned guitar aficionado and collector.