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Guitar World
Guitar World
Entertainment
Jamie Dickson

“It was kind of a wild idea in 1960 to call a guitar a Hummingbird. As wild as calling your band TheBeatles”: How Gibson became an icon of acoustic guitar – 100 years on from its first flat-top

1963 Gibson Hummingbird.

Flat-top acoustic guitars weren’t really part of the plan for Gibson back in the pre-war years of the 20th century.

The Kalamazoo-based company was known for its archtops, and Martin, over in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, had a big head start on them by the time flat-top guitars were becoming really popular in the 1930s.

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