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.