Music Icon Les Paul Is Dead
The popular music community will miss one of its greatest inventors and musicians, Les Paul, who died Thursday. He was 94.
An avid musician, Paul continued performing until his last few months, but he succumbed to complications due to pneumonia and passed away in a hospital in White Plains, N.Y.
Paul is known not only for his musicmost notably his collaboration with his wife, Mary Fordbut his slew of important inventions in the music industry. Paul is most renowned for inventing the solid-body electric guitar, which he developed in the 1940s. After music icons such as Pete Townsend and Jimmy Page publicly touted the Les Paul Standard guitar as the instrument of choice, the Les Paul electric guitar series became a fixture in the music world, changing the sound of rock and pop forever.
Several of Paul's musician devotees, such as Kiss's Paul Stanley and country singer Keith Urban, have already paid public tribute to the rock legend.