Solid-Body Simplicity Personified -- Pure Rock'n'Roll Spirit!

This 13-inch-wide electric solid body weighs just 7.40 lbs. and has a nice, fat nut width of just over 1 11/16 inches and a standard Gibson scale length of 24 3/4 inches. Solid mahogany body with two-color brown-to-yellow Sunburst finish on top and brown finish on back and sides, mahogany neck, and unbound Brazilian rosewood fretboard with 22 all original frets and inlaid pearl dot markers. Headstock with "Gibson" logo and "Les Paul Junior" silk-screened in gold. Three-in-a-line Kluson 'single-line' Deluxe strip tuners with white plastic buttons. Serial number ("5 5887") stamped in black on the back of the headstock. One very hot P-90 pickup with an output of 8.12k. Black plastic pickguard. Two controls (one volume, one tone) on lower treble bout, potentiometers stamped "615 2532" & "615 4190" (ROC early fifties) and "Grey Tiger Type GT 452 .02 MFD" capacitor. Gold plastic barrel-shape "Speed" knobs. Original combination wrap-over bar bridge/tailpiece. There is some light body checking on the top and some minor belt buck buckle wear on the back. A few marks on the edges of the body and on the top edge of the headstock, but overall it is a good, solid 8.75...and it also has one of the hottest P-90s on the planet! This is one of the earliest "Les Paul Juniors" using the "ROC" pots (which were used only between 1949 and 1954) and the "Grey Tiger" capacitor, which preceeded the usual "Bumble-Bee". Housed in its original Gibson "alligator" softshell case with brown velvet lining -- fairly clean, but with the handle broken (8.00).

Introduced in 1954, the "budget" Les Paul Junior "was designed for and aimed at beginners. It did not pretend to be anything other than a cheaper guitar. The outline shape of its body was the same as the gold-top and Custom, but the most obvious difference to its Les Paul partners was a flat-top solid mahogany body. It had a single P-90 pickup, governed by a volume and tone control, and there were simple dot-shaped position markers along the unbound rosewood fingerboard. It was finished in Gibson's traditional two-colour brown-to-yellow sunburst, and had the wrap-over bar-shape bridge/tailpiece like the one used on the latest gold-top. The September 1954 pricelist showed the Les Paul Custom at $325 and the Les Paul Junior at $99.50. The gold-top meanwhile had sneaked up to $225" (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of the Gibson Les Paul, p. 25).

"At the time they were intended for guitar-teaching schools...but have now become revered for their direct rock'n'roll spirit" (Tony Bacon, 50 Years of the Gibson Les Paul, p. 23). So successful was this model, that an astonishing 9,750 guitars were shipped from the factory during its production run between 1954 and the end of 1957.