Gibson Blue Ridge

Gibson Blue Ridge #951085

This is an acoustic square-shouldered jumbo (dreadnaught) from 1968. The top is solid spruce. The back and sides are made of a two-layer laminate, maple on the inside, plain-sawn rosewood on the outside. The neck is one-piece mahogany with a rosewood fretboard. If you're into Gibson flattops, you might check out Gibson's Fabulous Flat-Top Guitars by Eldon Whitford, David Vinopal, and Dan Erlewine. This book contains more than 200 pages of Gibson history from the introduction of their first flat top acoustic (in 1926) right up to the present. There are also plenty of photographs (including 32 pages in glossy full color) of the guitars and the people who made them famous.

The term Dreadnaught was first used by the Ditson company to refer to their line of large-bodied guitars that were manufactured by the Martin company. The name is a reference to a powerful class of British battleships of the World War I era, and is properly applied only to the Martin design.

Gibson originally referred to their guitars of this class with the term Jumbo, and their first Jumbo models were round-shouldered guitars that were similar (in their width and depth) to the Martin flat-top designs. These early, round-shouldered designs had a neck that joined the body at the twelfth fret. Later, after the market forced a move to a neck with 14 frets clear of the body, Gibson introduced their square-shouldered jumbo design.