489 Les Paul (1915-2009) and Mary Ford (1924-1977) “Vaya Con Dios” 1953

“One day in the spring of 1953 the couple stumbled across the song that would eventually become the biggest seller of their entire career…Settling into their hotel room for the night, Mary pulled out a sewing kit and sat on the bed to mend one of her stage dresses, while Les turned on the radio and began to pack. Suddenly he heard Anita O’Day charging through an up-tempo arrangement of ‘Vaya con Dios.’” They liked the song and convinced their reluctant record producer to release and disk jockeys to play “their version much slower and simpler than Anita’s” (Mary Shaugnessy, Les Paul: An American Original, 1993). 

“A Capitol engineer said of Les Paul in 1954: ‘He gets an impossible musical idea, and then invents the mechanical means for carrying it out.’ The kind of manipulated sound which he was exploring, which depended so much on the electric guitar, was not fully exploited until the rock era” (Tom and Mary Anne Evans, Guitars, 1977). 

Les Paul and Mary Ford “Vaya Con Dios”