Watch Lonnie Mack, one of the original Flying V masters, trade licks with Tele titans Albert Collins and Roy Buchanan

(from left) Albert Collins, Lonnie Mack and Roy Buchanan perform onstage at Carnegie Hall in New York City on December 6, 1985
(Image credit: Ebet Roberts/Redferns)

To call Lonnie Mack one of the first masters of the iconic Gibson Flying V electric guitar is in no way hyperbole.  

Mack's most beloved V was a '58 model known as "Number 7," so named because it was the seventh V to ever roll out of Gibson's factory, then in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

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Jackson Maxwell

Jackson is an Associate Editor at GuitarWorld.com. He’s been writing and editing stories about new gear, technique and guitar-driven music both old and new since 2014, and has also written extensively on the same topics for Guitar Player. Elsewhere, his album reviews and essays have appeared in Louder and Unrecorded. Though open to music of all kinds, his greatest love has always been indie, and everything that falls under its massive umbrella. To that end, you can find him on Twitter crowing about whatever great new guitar band you need to drop everything to hear right now.