Les Paul is a towering figure of modern music. A performer for more than 80 years, he made unsurpassed contributions to the sound, scope, and design of the electric guitar. He was among the very first performers to use overdubbing, delay and phasing effects, tape echo, and multi-track recording. He designed the first eight-track recorder. As noted British critic Charles Shaar Murray describes, “If anybody is the missing link between Charlie Christian and Jimi Hendrix, it’s Les Paul. He was the first person to really understand the extent to which the electric guitar was a new instrument, as different from the acoustic as a Hammond organ is from a Steinway piano – or a car from a...