While folkies may have shuddered at Lopez’s treatment, pop audiences had the same positive reaction that his lounge audiences had. In 1963, the Folk Boom was in full flower, and Lopez supercharged such folk staples as “If I Had a Hammer” and “Lemon Tree” with an infectious vocal treatment and an energetic electric guitar strumming style that he calls “the Trini beat.” The more serious folkies might have dismissed those records as opportunistic exploitations of folk music, but they represented a personal triumph for Lopez as a Latino artist who had to fight to use his own name on his earliest recordings, and they laid some of the groundwork for later Latin rock music. He was discovered by Frank Sinatra in a nightclub in Los Angeles, where he fronted a three-piece combo playing the recently introduced Gibson Barney Kessel Custom. He was a young Mexican-American from Dallas named Trinidad “Trini” Lopez III. But he was more popular with radio audiences and record buyers than any of Gibson’s jazz giants, and in some years his Gibsons outsold all other signature models. The most successful Gibson signature artist of that decade, however, was not a jazz player, and not even a virtuoso guitarist. With Johnny Smith, Tal Farlow, and Barney Kessel (plus the Everly Brothers in the acoustic line and Howard Roberts as an Epiphone artist), Gibson had more signature-model clout than all other guitar makers combined. In the early 1960s, as Les Paul was leaving Gibson’s artist roster, the company recruited three of the most respected jazz guitarists to put their signatures on new “artist” model electrics.

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