The Charleston Light Opera Guild was founded in 1949 by a group of vocal teachers and talented amateur performers who sought an outlet for musical talent in the Kanawha Valley.  Leonard Stocker, the moving force in founding the Guild, had come to Charleston in 1948, after 15 years as a professional singer and actor.  A voice teacher at Mason College of Music in Charleston, he was joined by music teachers Margaret Hope Samms, Annie Laurie Leonard, and Marguerite Palmer in forming the Guild.  The first production was Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore which played to a standing room only audience at the Charleston High School Auditorium.  Throughout the 1950's, the guild continued to produce popular operettas.  Stocker, the first artistic director of the group, was succeeded by Lila Belle Brooks. 

The 1960's ushered in the era of Broadway musicals for the Guild.  The group purchased its first workshop in East Charleston in the middle of that decade and then in 1995 purchased and renovated the former Weekley Memorial Church on the Charleston's West Side.  Nina Denton Pasinetti became the artistic director in the 1983 after holding the reins of choreographer since 1971.

In December 2005 an endowment fund was established in honor of charter member Louis Husson's 80th birthday.  In December, 2006 Guild members appeared in a concert version of South Pacific with Tony award winners Brian Stokes Mitchell and Lillias White at the Greenbrier Hotel in honor of Guild Charter member Lawson Hamilton and his wife Jeanne's 60th wedding anniversary. 

Many working professionals in theater, television, film, and dance including singer Kathy Mattea and actresses Ann Magnuson and Jennifer Garner spent their formative years with the Guild.  Nina Denton Pasinetti, John Marshall, Louis Husson, and Roger Lucas have all received the Charleston Mayor's Award for Individual Artistic Achievement.  John Breed and Bud Lutman have received the Mayor's Volunteer Award.

The Guild provides high-quality entertainment through its "main stage" fall and spring musicals at the Charleston Civic Center Little Theater.  Smaller summer youth-oriented musicals are presented at the Guild's own 220-seat theater.  In the Fall of 2003, with the production of The Music Man, the Guild became the first community group to mount a production at the Charleston Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences.  The Guild has returned to that venue several times, most recently with the production of Beauty and the Beast, High School Musical and Cinderella.