What IS The "Black Betty" Les Paul? | Guitars of the Stars Ep.1

welcome back troglodytes to your daily dose of guitar information the trogley's guitar show today we start a new video series called guitars of the stars a project i've been wanting to start for two years but it's finally time to do this we're going to take a look at guitars used by famous artists either in music videos or live and fully identify them because the guitar community is curious what is going on here so if there's a mystery instrument that you've always wanted to know about please feel free to leave that in the comment section but to start this journey off let's cover the guitar that i get asked about just about every single day the black betty last paul this song was released in 1977 by the group ramjam the music video for this was just shot in a backyard somewhere it was just a great time with friends but a lot of people will look at this guitar right here and be like what on earth is that thing is it a les paul is it actually gibson is it some sort of like an ibanez lawsuit copy there's so much going on with this it says gibson right there on the pickup covers but at the same time the headstock is just completely not right so let's take a look at this piece by piece to figure this out granted the original black betty music video isn't in super high definition but don't worry current photos of this guitar have surfaced later on we'll get to those in a minute so in this first scene we can see it's a les paul with two humbuckers it looks like we have an abr one bridge with a regular stop bar tail piece it's kind of hard to tell what color this is what type of figuring might be there but we've just got our regular two volumes and two tones and it also appears that we're missing the poker chip around the toggle switch from the next angle that we see in the music video it's a little bit easier to tell that this is probably a natural finish of some sort and it's clearly a les paul shape but what is going on with this headstock it's always reminded me of an ibanez guitar but there's a few different ones that have looked like it but here you can see a nice close-up of an ibanez from 1979 that's a double neck when you look at it from right here and then you copy over here it's nearly almost an identical match and since the song came out in 1977 this is definitely around that era where many many knockoffs of les balls were starting to hit the market so i had always believed this just to be one of those but with like a unique headstock to it because let's face it if ibanez will rip off the les paul recording and make it a left-handed guitar build stratocasters they had some really beautiful straight up les paul copies even as far as ripping off an original special i mean the vintage ibanezes i haven't personally owned one but i've heard very good things about the quality of these early instruments so with their headstock looking like this and some of the standards looking like that it didn't seem so out of place that this might have started life like that because you can't quite read what the headstock might even say if it says something there as we continue on here we can see it has a first fret inlay which is not something you would normally find on a les paul standard at this time and the inlays themselves they don't appear to be mother of pearl or acrylic plastic they've got much more figuring to it so it might just be abalone on top of that the fretboard looks extra dark so we could be dealing with a super worn in dark piece of brazilian rosewood or it could just be ebony but it's in this close-up shot that we can tell that oh man that is a really nice bird's eye maple top on this thing it has no finish and here's that first time that we got the glimpse of the gibson pickup so it's pretty much at this point where people are just super confused about this guitar and i've always wanted answers for this mysterious and iconic beast so now it's time for me to tell you the rest of the tale let's give credit where credit's due the website ask zack i believe was the first one to get modern day photos of this guitar and tell us the rest of the story so you can visit them and read their entire article i was on a similar hunt to this guy back in 2019 but i couldn't find bill bartlett i could only find the main singer of the band and unfortunately he doesn't have very fond memories of this music video or time period so he didn't want to talk too much about it but here is the guitar as it sits today this actually is a gibson les paul that has been heavily modified this instrument started life as a 1954 raptail gold top so it would have looked very similar to this reportedly it was in near mint condition when he first purchased it in a trade deal so he added 50 cash and one of his other guitars for this what other guitar you might be asking a 1956 fender esquire you know a telecaster just with one pickup that'll be important later on in our tale but he used this guitar so extensively that it started to need some minor repairs the gold finish was starting to turn green in many areas flake off and others it just wasn't what he was wanting at that point in time i mean you gotta remember vintage guitars weren't always looked and sought after they were just used at that point in time so the very first thing he did to his 54 gold top is he ended up routing it out for humbuckers and he put some patent number pafs in there and the original p90 pickups that came out of this instrument he used for a mazerite project which we'll take a quick tangent off to talk about it was this guy right here so he put the original p90 pickups from that les paul into this double-necked guitar and just made some custom covers for them here you can see mr bartlett today playing that exact guitar and one of him all the way back in the day playing this with some harp skills so now that the original pickups were gone and he had some pafs in here he decided he was just going to completely remove the finish due to the cleaning and what he found was an absolutely ugly multi-piece top that had barely any figuring or maybe mix match he doesn't have any photos of the guitar at that point in time but he wanted a guitar similar to what paul bigsby used in the 50s so he took the time to hand chisel off the original maple top and then templated for a new bird's eye maple top to be put on here so that's what made the guitar look like this and that's why it's so unrecognizable to most 50s les pauls you don't find bird's eye that often not like this anyways so that explains the body and some of the replaced parts that he's got going on here but when he played this guitar live he would like to induce feedback by bending the headstock against his marshall amp similar to what jeff beck would do and he accidentally cracked the headstock now it's not 100 clear to me how he cracked it but i'm almost guessing it was like a wing separation of some sort because what this article was talking about is he decided to modify the headstock by putting new wings on it so he was clearly influenced by like the ibanez design some maserati guitars also looked like this i mean remember he was working on that maserati project guitar so it was very in his face it's kind of what he was liking in guitars at that point in time so i'm not sure how he did it he just did it i mean it looks to me like he just added new wings and then had these swirly bits as part of the new wing like you can just barely tell the original gibson headstock underneath there and then obviously there were some finished touch-ups and other things done where he put like kind of a what looks like a flower pot inlay on the headstock and he did those in abalone inlay and then he also decided to add that first fret marker there and replace all the other fret markers on the guitar to abalone so it matched so looking at the headstock now that we've got a nice close-up photo you can see it's definitely worn he played this guitar quite a bit and some of these modifications they don't look like 100 professional but given the tools that were available to him when he was doing these mods it seems to be all right like you can see the lacquer has chipped off of this now it appears to be like some sort of like a flower pot floral type thing that you would find on fancy guitars but hey we even have grover imperial tuner style tips i'm not sure if those are actually grovers on it i mean there's tons of stuff that he could have modified it with but hey i wonder if that's real tortoise shell at this period like was it custom made or was it an old part to begin with it looks pretty cool though with the white black and white layers underneath that and it does seem to be positioned correctly for a 50s les paul those inlays he put in here are fantastic looking like this was around the time like when the les pauls were being built and that's kind of what the abalone in that guitar looks like as well except for we have trapezoid in lace here and it probably makes sense that he wanted to add that first fret because pete townsend had that on his les paul de luxe so i wonder if that is a tribute to that or just he wanted a first fret marker you can tell it might have been refrighted at one point in time i mean it had so much other work when it surprised me it's either that or the fret nibs have just been so small that they've been worn off over the years and you can tell there's definitely some fret wear there so that tells us the rest of that and then the next thing he did was swap it out with gold hardware and it's at this point in time where he added the gibson pickup covers now why he added the gibson pickup covers i don't know maybe so he could tell people yeah it did start life as a gibson but i always thought that those were 1972 gibson t-tops but according to this story it seems like it might be earlier t-tops or even slightly pre-t top pickups in there at that point in time they just had the cool gibson embossed covers that were done in 1972. you can find those stock on guitars like this one right here very nice les paul custom with it but you can also find other models with it as well now after the music video he continued to modify this guitar as we see it today the pickups have been replaced with carvin m22s and he's moved the pickup selector from here all the way down there and a la eddie van halen he swapped it out for just a master volume he capped off these other places with mother of pearl or abalone and he added some mini toggle switches to the instrument as well to affect the way it sounded these controlled the split coils for each pickup and they could reverse the polarity and he did that to get the mickey baker love his strange hey mickey baker check out the mickey baker les paul custom that thing's pretty interesting in itself and i have done a full review and documentation of a reissue on that in its current day state it looks like this might have been either three pieces or we just have some cracks forming he wore the new finish off the side right here and interestingly enough when he modified this he ended up giving it multiply binding regularly standards would just have a single band around it but this one it appears to be three or four let's count one two three uh it's kind of hard to tell if there's another black layer right there or not but potentially four layers so not quite custom not quite standard just something all on his own but it's interesting how this line matches up pretty well with that so that makes me believe that yeah this probably is a three-piece top all quilted and everything and hey we've got the bridge that kirk hammett was famous for using right here an alembic brass bridge but the tailpiece looks fairly modern on it right now i wonder if he swapped that out between now and then but what an interesting tale of this guitar bill i know you're not necessarily on the internet too much but if you happen to see this video i would love to borrow this guitar and document it in all its glory so we can see everything that's been done to this instrument i think it definitely needs some video documentation i said it was important to note the esquire earlier right it seems bill might actually prefer playing telecasters after all because he was asked in 2009 to perform black betty live at the summer of love 3 in cincinnati ohio and this is the guitar that he chose to do that with which is kind of cool because it appears to have a charlie christian pickup with it once again having some tortoise shell pickguard on it super flame top i'm surprised he didn't go for bird's eye again but maybe his personal preferences have changed since then but it does appear to be double bound and probably custom-made he seems to be a tinkerer so what a cool story it's fantastic that we finally got to see this guitar in its current format it's a shame that it was further modified so it's not exactly what we've seen in the video but this is such a cool guitar a piece of history of rock music because black betty is a very iconic song if you haven't listened to it please do a fun story is black betty actually had nothing to do with race or anything like that in this iteration anyways because this song is actually kind of a cover by a guy named lead belly which he took from an old tune that people would sing when they were breaking rocks to create gravel for roads but when he was singing it he was always thinking of betty page he liked the pin-up of her when she had a whip so when he was singing black betty it was for her because she liked to wear black it had nothing to do with race and the naacp given him hard times about it it was not justified so troglodytes i hope you enjoy knowing the real truth behind the black betty last paul yes it is a real les paul it's just been heavily modified and it was formerly a 1954 goal top serial number four zero seven five five if you have a mysterious guitar that you would like me to discuss on the guitars of the stars mini series please email your suggestions to treytrogly gmail.com or leave a comment here i might need your guys's help on some of these so be sure to check my community posts in the future don't forget to like comment and subscribe and we will catch you tomorrow on the next episode take care [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Trogly's Guitar Show

Views: 461,522

Keywords: the trogly's guitar show, trogly, gibson, gibson les paul, Black Betty Guitar, Black Betty Les Paul, what is the black betty song about, What guitar is in black betty music video, Black Betty Music Video Les Paul, bill bartlett black betty live, bill bartlett ram jam, bill bartlett black betty, bill bartlett, bill bartlett interview, Black Betty Guitar Mystery, What Guitar is in Black Betty Music Video, What guitar is black betty, Ram Jam black betty guitar, Guitars of the Stars

Id: qIE83cvI8Wc

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021