Like most 13-year-old boys in the early ’60s, Harry Branton was starting to notice girls. Also noticeable was how those girls “noticed” a classmate strumming a guitar at recess. On a Spanish-class field trip to Mexico in the summer of 1963, he bought a cheap steel-string acoustic and immediately started learning chords. Seeing his zeal, his mother soon after got the boy a new Gibson B-25-12, follo...