Scraping Binding & Antiquing Your Gibson Acoustic Guitars | The Process S2 EP8
 

interesting video that shows a lot of hands on work still done on Gibson acoustics. Also shows the importance of female workers now and in decades past. Excellent video irregardless if you are a Gibson owner or not.

Thank you for posting this.

I was, unfortunately, involved. Gibson guitar company reached out to me. The company asked for permission to use the classic Kalamazoo Gals photo of women guitar makers standing in front of the Gibson factory in 1944. "Sure," I naively responded. "But you need to credit the Gals and me and link to my site and the Kalamazoo Gals book site." A Gibson minion responded, "Of course! And we'll send you the link to the video when we post it." The minion did not send me the link. I Googled and found it. No reference to the Kalamazoo Gals. The speaker in the video, a Gibson VP to whom I gave a copy of my book said, "The history books call them the Gibson Gals." The history books don't address the issue because Gibson covered it up. No links. No reference to the Kalamazoo Gals except a tiny credit to me at the end of the video: "Kalamazoo Gals photo, John Thomas." No reference to my book. No, well, respect.

But my friends around the planet commented on the video on YouTube. In response, Gibson has kindly provided in the text below the YouTube video a link to the Kalamazoo Gals website and has changed "Gibson Gals" to "Kalamazoo Gals."

Unfortunately, the marketing folks don't always know the details of the stories they are telling or the products they are selling. Glad they made the corrections. They are making some nice guitars right now. But their prices are climbing to the point of not being a working man's guitar. They sell affordable models, but not their iconic ones.

Yeah, when one of the male employees says, “So for the last almost 130 years we’ve celebrated women in the workforce at Gibson…” it makes you wonder if they’ve read your book. Even after the book was published, Gibson seemed in denial that the Kalamazoo Gals existed. Perhaps it was because Gibson’s wartime production of guitars violated War Production Board restrictions? Who knows.

Thanks Daryl. I couldn't do that. Wow.

Thanks for sharing this video.
"Irregardless" = without/regard/without -- Pretty please, �� do not use this "word." ��

People came "out of the woodworks" in the YT comments section complimenting your book!

Or write "complement" when one means "compliment" ;)

Great video, thanks for posting it Daryl. And it's nice that Gibson finally acknowledged John's book as promised; not that they had much choice given all the other comments about it.

Yes. Certainly made me feel good.

You caught me! Can't recall if that was me, or autocorrect. "Complement" ALMOST works. But darn, the emoji I tried to use, did not work. "Pretty please" (cherry--not cheery)

John,

Yours is an amazing book and great research done. I'm sorry to hear that Gibson was so thoughtless and ignorantly corporate in their behavior.

You are the better man.

The YT comments section was a complement of compliments. Compromise complete.

And neither of us wrote compliment's to denote the plural of compliment, so we can hold our heads high!

Thank you, kind sir.

Ohhh, apostrophes! Autocorrect has really done a job on people.
The travesty that is "Its" and "It's" is especially head-shaking. I teach English in Japan, and almost anytime, ANYWHERE there is a word written in English that has a 's' at the end, an apostrophe WILL be present. As best as I can figure, this is due to the concept of plural being expressed differently in the Japanese language.