In the middle of the folk music boom in 1963, a young Mexican-American named Trini Lopez took folk favorites, such as "If I Had a Hammer" and "Lemon Tree," and supercharged them with a three-piece combo arrangement, driven by Trini himself strumming an electric guitar. His live recordings rocked folk music with an engaging Latin energy that the coming generation of folk-rockers never captured. He paved the way for Latin rock music, and he also holds an important place in Gibson history. In the mid-'60s, one of his signature Gibson models (he had two) was Gibson's best-selling artist model.

More than 50 albums and almost 40 years later, Lopez is a worldwide star. He's acted in A-list films and has recently been inducted into the Las Vegas Casino Hall of Fame. Musically, he's still rocking - his latest CD, Legacy: My Texas Roots, was recorded in his hometown of Dallas with his Texas Roots Combo, bassist/producer Art Greenhaw (of the Light Crust Doughboys) and Trini's sax-playing brother, Jesse Lopez.

The CD includes a wide range of styles from ballads to rockers, but the signature Trini treatment is most evident on classic early rock tunes like "Chantilly Lace" and "I'm Walkin'," where Lopez kicks up the tempo a notch. For new generations of listeners who might wonder how it worked back in the 1960s, Lopez's energetic version of the recent bluegrass hit "Man of Constant Sorrow" provides a perfect example.

The foundation of Lopez's sound is the same as it was in 1963 - the "Trini Beat." As he explains, "I sing ballads, but I also like upbeat rhythm songs. We need more happiness in the world, and I just started a beat that everybody loved, everywhere I went in the world. Reporters, interviewers, people that went to my show would say, 'You talk about rhythm, how about the Trini Beat?' I always wanted to be a good singer, and my guitar helped me along when I couldn't afford musicians. My guitar was a savior. I accompanied myself and I learned to play bass, lead and rhythm all at one time."

The guitar that provides the Trini Beat is the Trini Lopez Deluxe, which is almost as famous as the artist himself. "What's been going on in the last 20, 25 years with my guitar, the acceptance has been unbelievable," he says. "Not because it's me, because I don't like to brag, but I'll get off planes in different parts of the world and people will be waiting for me with a Trini Lopez guitar. Some will have a knife. I say, 'Do you have a pen?' 'No, I want you to carve your name in the front.' I've done it a couple of times. It's painful.

"You wouldn't believe the e-mails. They want to know, will Gibson be reissuing them? I get letters. I get faxes. People stop me when I'm rehearsing for shows. They just gawk at the guitar. They want to touch it."

The Trini Beat started in Dallas, where Trinidad Lopez III was born and raised. His father taught him to play guitar, and he grew up playing rock and country music. His first guitar was a "black, full-bodied guitar" his father bought him when he was 9 or 10 years old. Next came a Martin acoustic with a pickup. "It got a big sound," he recalls. "I always believed in a big sound. I needed to have as much sound as I could musically, and I learned to chord those big open chords."

He broke into the recording business on a local label and was then signed to the Cincinnati-based King Records when he was 18. Most of his King recordings were covers of country songs by other King artists, and he had to fight to use his real name on those records.

His Hispanic name was still an issue when he got his next recording opportunity, arranged by another young Texan with an energetic guitar style - Buddy Holly. "He asked me if I had done any recording," Lopez recalls. "I met him in Wichita Falls, Texas. He liked me and wanted me to meet his record producer. He said, 'If you can get to Clovis, New Mexico, you can.'" Lopez took his band to Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, but according to Trini, neither Petty nor his bandmembers wanted the Lopez name on a record, and their recording - an instrumental - was released under the name The Big Beats.

His connection with Holly died a few months later when Holly's plane crashed on Feb. 3, 1959, but Holly's band, the Crickets, remembered him. The Crickets had split with Holly a few months before the crash and pursued their own recording career. In 1960 they found themselves in Los Angeles without a lead singer. "The Crickets called me from Hollywood," he remembers. "They had heard me sing in Clovis and asked me to take over Buddy's place." Lopez accepted, jumped in his station wagon with "The Trini Lopez Combo" painted on the doors, and headed straight to Hollywood. But . . . "When I got to L.A. the guys were partying every night and having a ball. They weren't in a hurry to get going. I only had about $200 in my pocket."

Looking for a temporary job to tide him over, he landed a two-week gig at Ye Little Club in Beverly Hills as the opening act for Joanie Sommers. (Sommers was just getting her career off the ground with the single "One Boy" from the musical Bye Bye Birdie. She would peak in 1962 with "Johnny Get Angry.") The two-week engagement lasted a full year. It was just Trini and his Gibson Barney Kessel guitar. The Kessel had a unique look - a full-depth, double-cutaway archtop electric with pointed horns - that Lopez would later adopt for his own model.

He had heard of a club called PJ's that was a favorite hangout of his idol, Frank Sinatra. Hoping to meet and be seen by Sinatra, he auditioned for PJ's and signed on for three months. He ended up staying a year-and-a-half. Sinatra, who owned Reprise Records, sent producer Don Costa to check out the new singer. Costa recognized the magical connection Lopez had with a live audience, and that's the way Costa recorded him. Trini Lopez Live at PJ's was released in 1963, and Lopez's energetic, feel-good performance of "If I Had a Hammer" (a hit from Peter, Paul and Mary's 1962 debut) shot up the pop charts. By the end of the year, a follow-up album entitled More Trini Lopez at PJ's: By Request was making Lopez the best-selling artist on the Reprise label.

Lopez was one of the hottest acts going in 1963, and his out-front guitar was an integral part of his sound. The people at Gibson couldn't help but notice. Gibson had launched an artist signature campaign in 1961 when jazz great Johnny Smith left Guild and signed with Gibson. Another jazzman, Barney Kessel, endorsed two Gibson models that also debuted in 1961. The next year, Gibson introduced yet another artist model from a jazz guitarist - Tal Farlow (even though Farlow had retired from music to become a sign painter). These artists were highly respected players but not well-known in the general pop audience. Trini Lopez represented a radical departure for Gibson's electric line in that he was a currently popular artist. (Gibson signed up the Everly Brothers for an acoustic model that debuted late in 1962, but they had already peaked and wouldn't have another Top 10 record.)

"Not only were they all jazz guys, I was the only Latino," Trini says, "and I'm very proud of that. I can't think of the name of the gentleman that was in charge of the Gibson situation. I was in Chicago appearing at Mr. Kelly's and lining them up and down the street every show. He came in between shows and talked to me. He said 'we're interested in having you design a guitar for us.' I couldn't believe it. I went to the factory and they took me around and I met all the executives there in Chicago."

"I told them that I thought maybe we should concentrate on the younger kids at that time," Lopez continues. "I was into popular music, even though I was doing rock and roll and things like that - but not as much as the typical rock groups - I said for the rock groups, we should make a rock model."

In 1964 Gibson introduced not just one, but two Lopez models. The Deluxe - the jazz model and the one that Trini himself still plays - was based on the Barney Kessel body. Lopez moved the selector switch up to the treble-side horn and added a standby switch on the bass horn. For the Lopez Standard - the rock and roll model - he used the ES-335 semi-hollowbody as a starting point. On both models he specified diamond-shaped soundholes, slashed-diamond inlays (an inlay pattern that has appeared on a number of Gibsons since then, including the current ES-137C), and as a throwback to his early years when he played a Fender, a headstock with all the tuners on one side.

Lopezs last appearance in Billboard's Top 40 came in 1966 with "I'm Comin Home, Cindy," but he began acting on TV shows, and Sinatra helped him launch a movie career by including him in the cast of Marriage on the Rocks (starring Sinatra and Dean Martin) in 1965. He is best remembered for his role in the 1967 World War II movie, The Dirty Dozen, starring Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson.

As his career continued to grow, Trini's Gibson models continued to sell. The semihollow Standard model (the one based on the ES-335) sold a total of 1,966 units from 1964-70 - more than twice its nearest rival, the Barney Kessel Regular, which sold only 719 over the same period. The Lopez Deluxe (based on the Kessel body) sold 307 units during the same period. Although the Lopez models hadn't been offered during the first three years of the decade, they still accounted for over half of all the artist models of the 1960s, a group that includes Smith, Kessel, Farlow, Byrdland (Billy Byrd and Hank Garland) and the Everlys (but does not include Les Paul).

Throughout these years, Lopez's guitar was in the spotlight, but his amp was not - partly because he didn't want people to know his settings and partly because it wasn't a Gibson. "It's not just the amp," he says. "It's how you feel it when you play it. It's the touch." (For the historical record, he used a Fender Twin Reverb.)

Today Trini is still performing and enjoying international fame. BMG released a new CD, Trini Lopez Dance Party, in Europe and South America in 1998. He signed a two-CD deal with Sony in 2002. He has a recent hit in Italy from a CD he recorded for an Italian label, and another new CD, Dance the Night Away is offered on his Web site. In 2001 he was honored with the Living Legends Award by the Nosostros organization, with Ricardo Montalban presenting the award. In April 2002 he was inducted into the Las Vegas Casino Legends Hall of Fame at the Tropicana Resort. He'll be appearing as a special guest at the Arlington (Texas) Guitar Show, the largest of all the vintage guitar shows, October 19 and 20. And he's still playing his Gibson Trini Lopez Deluxe guitar.

Go here to order Legacy: My Texas Roots