This is the guitar I learned to play on, a Gibson LGO

The neck rivals anything Gibson ever put out.

This was also the least expensive model Gibson ever put out, and they apparently put out thousands and thousands of them.  Mine is a 1955, all mahogany, LGO with modifications I made when I was a teenager.  Full of cracks.  A quiet guitar.

I got my LGO from my dad, and through him my dad's mother, Bess.  I was born the year that guitar was made, 1955.

My grandmother was a conservative white woman who once voted for George Wallace, ostensibly to piss off my dad.  Whose family was from north Florida/south Alabama, newly prosperous in the 1920s--and they claimed to detest Negroes.  

Bess used to take us for lunch to her favorite luncheon counter, in a department store in Pensacola.  I remember seeing an old Negro playing accordion on the sidewalk, with a hat and coal-black sunglasses on, and a tin cup attached to his accordion.  Grandmommy griped--and not under her breath, but so everyone could hear--that there were too many Negroes allowed to walk around downtown. 

Grandma Bess's daddy, "Irish Buck" Turner, hired plenty of Negroes at his turpentine mill in south Alabama.  My dad visited it once, he told me later.  Story is, Buck actually did time for killing a Negro who worked for him, but I find it hard to believe that a Florida court would jail a white man for the murder of a Negro, in those days.

Grandmommy bought the guitar at a big old music store in Pensacola (I visited it once, years later), and gave it to my dad when I was born as a dig for becoming a bearded, liberal, college professor--a beatnik.  He really wasn't. 

When I learned four chords on the guitar by the time I was 13, so Dad gave it to me, since he'd only learned three. 

I still have it.