“A flamboyant guitar suited to a flamboyant performer”: T-Bone Walker’s Gibson ES-5N helped give rise to electric blues – and it’s been listed for $2 million

T-Bone Walker’s iconic 1949 Gibson ES-5N has been listed on Reverb for a whopping $2 million.

The Texas-born guitarist helped pioneer the electric blues during the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, inspiring more iconic guitarists along the way – and he played no other guitar as much as he did this hollowbody.

For years, the instrument was thought to be lost forever, before it resurfaced at an auction in France a few years ago, and its new owner invited author Tony Bacon to pen a book about the iconic electric guitar; a story which he relayed to Guitar World in great detail.

Patrick Racz, the entrepreneur who bought the guitar after making his fortune in the music and tech industries, is now ready to part ways with the instrument, and its £2M price tag would see it break into the top 10 most expensive guitars ever sold. It would outstrip the $1.9M Jerry Garcia's Wolf sold for in 2017, but fall short of the $2.41M figure generated through the sale of John Lennon's Love Me Do Gibson J160E two years earlier.

As Bacon explains in his GW piece, the ES-5N wasn't T-Bone Walker's first electric, but Gibson's first three pickup guitar was his most faithful.

“T-Bone’s guitar had a luxurious vibe, the flamey maple top layer of its laminated body positively glowing through the blonde finish, set off by the gold-plated metalwork and the pearl block markers in the Brazilian rosewood ’board,” he writes.

“It was a flamboyant guitar ideally suited to a flamboyant performer, and it served him well for the great Imperial recording sessions and the live shows of the early ‘50s, and all of his studio and stage work that followed, right through to the late ‘60s.”

Most notably, it was this guitar he played in a show in Manchester, England, in 1962, where Keith Richards, John Mayall, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones were in attendance.

What exactly happened in France in 1968, when the guitar left Walker's possession, is steeped in mystery, but its reappearance, and subsequent re-listing on Reverb, continues the guitar's fascinating history.

Walker's playing had a profound impact on Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and B.B. King, along with an array of others, which is why the guitar is often described as the one that started it all.

The 25.5" scale guitar, complete with a trio of P-90 pickups, is said to be in very good condition and is being sold by Regent Sounds Vintage in London.

Moreover, the guitar is the first instrument to be entered into the International Registry for Vintage & Rare Stringed Instruments. Owning this guitar, the Reverb listing says, is “equivalent to holding a tangible artifact of great importance to the history of music.”

See Reverb for more.

Such is the spirit of the blues, T-Bone Walker was always helping out others. To name just two examples, he gave guitar lessons to Steve Miller and helped get a 13-year-old Jimmie Vaughan into a B.B. King show.