Law, Music, and Cultural History

       When most people look at a guitar, they see a musical implement and, maybe, an art object. But, I see a repository of cultural history, informed by law. Consider, for example, the guitars that the Gibson company built during WWII. Most guitar aficionados (aka, guitar geeks) consider Gibson’s WWII acoustics to be among its finest guitars ever. The conventional explanation for this is that only the company’s older, seasoned craftsmen were exempted from war duty. Well, I found a 1944 Gibson workforce photo and, guess what? Nearly every one of those “craftsmen” was a craftswoman. Yes, nearly every, single luthier at the Gibson Company during World War II was a woman. I’ve managed to track down and interview in person a dozen of those women. Those interviews from the centerpiece of my book in progress, Gibsons: The Story of the Flattop Guitars of 1942 - 1945 and the Extraordinary Women (and a Few Men) Who Built Them (Michigan State University Press), and a corresponding museum exhibit.
       Not only have I looked at these guitars, but I’ve looked through them. With the help of Quinnipiac’s imaging technology staff, I’ve x-rayed pre-, post-, and during-WWII instruments in a quest to find measurable differences (I did and published the results in a journal of radiology technology).
       Finally, this brings me to the point of my first QU Law blog entry. Behold this image. It’s a photograph taken  of a nearly all-female Gibson workforce in China (in a startup factory to build guitars for the Chinese) holding printouts of my X-rays of a 1942 Gibson built by a nearly all-female workforce in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

W. John Thomas
Professor of Law
BA, JD, University of Arizona; MPH, LLM, Yale University