“Like Gretsch’s Duo Jet, it was surely spurred by Gibson’s success with the Les Paul”: The mysterious history of the Guild M-75 Aristocrat, the blue-blooded hollowbody played by John Lee Hooker, John Mayer, St. Vincent and Dan Auerbach

Guild Guitars co-founder Alfred (real name Avram) Dronge was born in Poland in 1911 and emigrated to the US, via a two-year stay in Paris, in 1916, settling in New York City.

As an accomplished musician, he was first a guitar teacher and club player, before opening a music store in the mid-1930s in Manhattan’s Park Row. After some persuasion by friend and ex-Epiphone executive George Mann, Dronge and Mann founded Guild Guitars Inc in October 1952. It would be neither the first nor the last time a retailer or repairer saw opportunity in manufacture.

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