REWIND

REWIND

(Tech Talk is pleased to present an ongoing-series concerning the basic history of instruments in the last 50 years. In this column we ’ll discuss who gets the credit [or blame] for the first electric guitar and how it came about. This is, by necessity, an overview at best. If you’re interested in reading more, we highly recommend Tom Wheeler’s American Guitar, a must for any serious student of the instrument.)

I suppose it was inevitable that the guitar would dominate popular music in the second half of this century: it’s the instrument of the common people. The early popularity of the guitar is easily explainable; it was cheap and easy to learn. Depression-era parents and families might not have been able to afford a piano, but a guitar was within the reach of most. Even if you were unable to purchase a guitar, the knowledge necessary to make a primitive instrument was within the grasp of most woodworkers and machinists. Stories of homemade guitars abound. According to one near-legend, B.B. King is supposed to have made his first instrument from chicken wire and wood.

In truth, the guitar had a very minor role in popular American music until after World War I. It was never considered a soloist’s instrument and—in the late 19th and early 20th century—was considered inferior to the banjo and the mandolin. In minstrel shows, Broadway and the blues, the guitar was primarily a rhythm instrument, playing strokes with doubled drums and/or other instruments. The banjo, with its resonating body, was much louder and therefore the primary stringed instrument.

The guitar was a mainstay in the early jazz bands of the ’20s, and a style of playing developed around the instrument’s ability to chord and play rhythm. With six strings, the instrument could obviously play chords of varying complexity and at the same time enhance the rhythm section with propulsive movement and warm tone.

Although there were many great guitarists in the big band days, one of the greatest was the late Freddie Green, who played with Count Basie’s band for 50 years. If there was ever proof that if you do something real good you’ll never be out of work, Freddie Green is it. Green played rhythm guitar; he never took a solo. He changed chords with awesome dexterity and reinforced the percussive section of Basie’s orchestra with down strokes, his chord work enhancing the overall musical texture. Remember, in most cases, the only two instruments in big bands actually playing chords are the guitar and keyboard.

While big bands and jazz grew in popularity, the need to make the guitar louder was becoming apparent. However, guitars became electric and solid-bodied because of the radio, country music and mail order catalogues.

The radio created a whole new space for musicians. Local and regional talent pools were drawn to professional music in an unprecedented way. The rural areas in particular suddenly had forums for their local favorites, and it’s here that music like country and the blues (and, later, R&B) moved beyond folk and into popular acceptance. All laid down their own roots in the earliest days of radio, and radio fueled the audience s musical hunger. Meanwhile, Thomas Edison’s gold mine, the phonograph, had been developed enough to be mass-marketed via catalogue and department stores. Folk music was what people played around a campfire, but Jimmie Rodgers’s ‘‘The Singing Brakeman” and Tampa Red were on the radio and making wax. And, at the time, the Sears catalogue could send you an axe for a buck-and-a-half.

It was about this time that the earliest pioneers of the electric guitar started fooling around with pick-ups. As audiences expanded, so did their tastes, and for some reason Hawaiian music began to really catch on in the States. Modern cpuntry music owes its pedal steel roots entirely to the form, in fact.

At that time, the Midwest was a manufacturing center for musical instruments. Los Angeles, with its swelling population, had also become a center of music manufacturing, as many European craftsman and machinists fled their countries for the warm Southern California climate. It was in the Los Angeles area in the decades just before WWII that the first electric guitars were manufactured. It’s hard to find anyone who will admit to being second but there are a handful of people who claim to be the first. It’s generally agreed, however, that National/Dobro was right there at the start, if not actually the first.

The whole idea was the guitar had to be made louder—it was now a louder world. John Dopyera, along with his brothers (DoBro), had conceived the idea of the resonating pan in order to compete with the banjo, and had had much success. When the Dopyeras founded National they hired Adolph Rickenbacker as an engineer, along with Victor Smith. Here is where things get confused. Wherever the real truth lies, all the early guys knew each other and ideas were everywhere. Prior to the early Rickenbacker and National designs of the early '30s there had been many experiments with turning the guitar into an “electronic” instrument to be used in conjunction with an amplifier, but the first successful models to be marketed were the Rickenbacker ‘‘Frying Pan” Hawaiian lap steel (circa 1935), and that instrument was the first solid body of any real consequence. Dobro had an acoustic/electric available, with an amp, around 1930. Finally, in the mid-to-late-’30s, Gibson gave in and issued several models with removable pick-ups. These are the designs most of us associate with jazz-style playing. The Gibson ES and L series became somewhat synonymous with Charlie Christian, whose solo playing— along with Django Reinhardt’s—is the genesis of guitar’s melodic theory. It really doesn’t matter if your playing is rock ’n’ roll, C&W, R&B or blues—these two guys were the cornerstone of modern electric guitar. Remember those names, because, for now, our little primer is over. Next month we’ll get into guitars from about 1947 through the present. We’ll take a trip to Orange County and Bakersfield, delving into Leo Fender’s role in revolutionizing music, and recall Paul Bigsby, who showed us how to bend strings, among other things. See you then.