Hartley Peavey began his company 40 years ago to assert that you can have quality, craftsmanship and value at fair and reasonable prices. This simple philosophy has altered the course of the music industry and changed Hartley from an amateur musician to champion of musicians—and it continues to drive his company today.

"People kept saying, 'I wish someone would build good gear for a fair price,'" founder and sole owner Hartley Peavey remembers. "That sounded like a good idea to me."

Hartley took that idea and turned it into one of the music industry's most influential and ultimately consequential success stories. With a meager $8,000, Hartley established his company in a small room above his father's music store in 1965, building one guitar amplifier per week. In the ensuing years—and with the help of his innovations in guitar amplifiers, P.A. sound systems, guitars and eventually computer-based audio networking—Hartley would expand his company's reach to 136 countries around the world.

At 40, Peavey is the most vertically integrated family-owned private corporation in the musical instrument and sound equipment industry, and Hartley engages his imagination with a 27-facility engineering and manufacturing juggernaut. He knows that his company’s finest work still lies ahead. "We're more focused on the future than ever," he says. "We've pioneered a lot of 'firsts' in this industry, but there's plenty of fertile ground ahead of us. I'm not, by any means, content with what we've done so far."

With a continuing commitment to Research & Development, Peavey leads the industry in numbers of patents, trademarks and registered products—an ever-present indication of Peavey's ongoing innovation and an indicator of what this Mississippi-based global leader will accomplish in the next 40 years.