Electro Music / Donald Leslie

ActivePasadena, California, USA

BornDanville, Illinois, USA

DiedAltadena, California, USA

BiographyDonald Leslie (born 13 April 1911 in Danville, Illinois; died 2 September 2004 in Altadena, California) is best known for designing and manufacturing the Leslie tone cabinet. There is little documented information about Leslie’s early life, however it has been cited that he relocated with his family as a child to Glendale, California, spending the majority of his adult life in Pasadena and Altadena, both in southern California. In his early adult life, he worked as an engineer. His first encounter with a Hammond organ was in the Barker Brothers Furniture Store in Los Angeles, where he serviced tube-based radios. During the Second World War, Leslie worked for the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Following a rejection by the Hammond Organ Company to incorporate his first speaker prototype into their product line of Hammond speakers in 1940, Leslie continued to manufacture and market his speakers independently under the company name Electro Music, which was formally established in Pasadena. In this capacity, his speaker cabinets enjoyed extensive usage throughout the 1940s and 1950s with numerous electromechanical organs, both within studios and in consumer homes. The name of the Leslie speaker varied considerably throughout the 1940s, changing from the Hollywood speaker to the Crawford speaker, in recognition of theatre organist Jesse Crawford, to the Leslie Vibraphone in 1947. Since the late 1940s, however, it has been colloquially referred to as “the Leslie”. In 1965, Electro Music was sold to CBS Musical Instruments, who had previously acquired the Fender Rhodes line of electromechanical pianos a year prior. In the early 1980s, some forty years after the first Leslie speaker was propositioned to Laurens Hammond, the Hammond Organ Company purchased the Leslie speaker, with all remaining products manufactured by the Suzuki-Hammond brand of the Suzuki Musical Instruments Corporation. Throughout his life, Don Leslie obtained 48 patents, both for the speaker and for other musical products. For his contributions, Leslie was inducted into the American Music Conference Hall of Fame in 2003 alongside Laurens Hammond, inventor of the Hammond organ in 1935, and Leo Fender, creator of the first solid-body electric guitar in 1950.