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| Boscoe France Spends Birthday at Gibson Custom Shop Boscoe France, 2012 winner of Guitar Center's Battle of the Blues, spent his birthday in a guitar player's heaven: The Gibson Custom Shop in Nashville. As part of his prize package for winning Guitar Center's national blues guitar player contest, the Madisonville, Ky., musician was given a tour of the legendary guitar facility. At the end of the tour, which coincided with the guitarist's birthday recently, France was told to select a Gibson custom guitar of his choice. "I'm pretty ecstatic, " France says about his new guitar, a lemon burst '59 R Custom Shop Vintage Old Stock Les Paul. "There's no way I would own a guitar like this without it being a gift from Gibson. It's beautiful; I can't stop looking at it." After spending several hours touring the Custom Shop, meeting and talking with the folks who build select Gibson editions, Rick Gembar, vice president/general manager of Gibson Custom Shop, invited France to take home the guitar of his choosing. "I went down through that line, seeing all the guitars. I was looking for the ones that looked the most like the one Duane Allman played, with that faded look. We got to five or six of them right together and I was eyeballing them and then I played a few of them. It's vintage old stock, which means it's brand new but the gloss is burnished off the finish just a little (to make it look old). It looks like it's tiger-striped. It's beautiful." France put his new guitar to work right away, when he was unexpectedly invited to play that same night at the Blues At Fontanel event in Nashville, with Eric Gales and the Bart Walker Band. "I went to the show to watch some amazing blues players and Bart was kind enough to ask me onstage to sit in with them, " France says. "So I pulled out my new '59 for its debut performance. It was awesome!" France's new '59 is just getting started on its performance trek. The guitarist travels to Los Angeles in early December for two days of recording with Grammy-winning producer Pete Anderson, compliments of Guitar Center. He'll return to Southern California in late January to the NAMM Show, where he's scheduled to play at the Guitar Center in Orange, Calif., as well as in the booths of several of his endorsers, including Egnater Amplifiers and Gibson Guitars. The last week of January, the Boscoe France Band will be in Memphis for the International Blues Challenge, where the trio will compete with hundreds of other blues musicians in one of the most respected music competitions in the world. write your comments about the article :: © 2012 Jazz News :: home page |