Electric Guitar

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Andre Millard

This instrument has dominated the production of popular music since its invention in the 1940s. Although primarily identified with both the sound and the image of rock 'n' roll, the electric guitar has made its mark on all genres of popular music, from country to world beat. Combined with an amplifier, and armed with a large inventory of special effects, the electric guitar is an extremely versatile instrument that can produce an infinite variety of sounds. Its ease of playing and low cost have made it an important consumer good of the twentieth century. It has given the baby boom generation the means to make their own music and emulate the great guitar heroes of their times.

Musicians began to consider electric amplification of the acoustic guitar during the 1930s when guitar players sat in the rhythm sections of the big bands and struggled to be heard. The Western Electric system of amplification was readily available and was soon employed to power the signal coming from the first primitive guitar pickups. The first electric guitars were hollow bodied acoustic models with pickups attached, but in the 1940s guitars were made with solid bodies to better suit electric amplification. Leo Fender was the first to mass produce solid bodied electric guitars and his Telecaster (1951) and Stratocaster (1954) models remained in production in the 1990s. Fender established the basic layout of the electronics and the shape of his Stratocaster has been the most copied by other manufacturers of electric guitars.

The increased volume of the electric guitar was soon heard in popular music. Les Paul used a model of his own design to make successful records in both the country and popular fields in the 1940s and 1950s, but it took rock 'n' roll to showcase the power of the instrument and the great number of new sounds it could make. The electric guitar figured large in the two well springs of this new popular music: rhythm and blues from the black urban centers and rockabilly from the country. Blues musicians like Muddy Waters electrified a traditional music and brought it into the urban context, using the harder sounds of the electric guitar to make the blues more urgent and menacing. Country players had been the first to adopt the electric guitar perhaps because their audiences were used to the metallic sounds of the steel guitar which was extremely popular in the 1940s and 1950s. The high, ringing tones of the Fender guitar became the trademark of a new type of country music which was both more traditional than the popular records made in Nashville and more modern in its stark metallic tone. The Bakersfield sound of players like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens was created not far from the Fender factory in California and soon spread across the country.

The first rock guitarists--players like Scotty Moore, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly--were inspired by both sides of the racial divide in popular music and the successful hybrid they produced came to be called rock 'n' roll. Buddy Holly was the most influential exponent of the rock guitar not only because of his playing, which used basic chords in an energetic and exciting way, but also because he popularized the all guitar lineup of the rock 'n' roll band: lead, bass (and later rhythm) guitars playing through the same amplification system in front of the drums. Holly's music was widely disseminated on records and the simplicity of his playing made it easy to copy; thousands of teenagers learned how to play rock guitar by listening to his recordings and many of them went on to form their own bands.

Leo Fender had designed his solid bodied guitars with ease of manufacture in mind and quickly moved into mass production. The unprecedented appeal of rock 'n' roll created an enormous demand for electric guitars and by the 1960s the production of instruments had become a highly profitable and crowded industry. Most of the manufacturers of acoustic guitars, such as Gibson and Gretsch, had moved into electric models and a host of new companies entered the field: including Mosrite and Peavey. There were also many new manufacturers of amplifiers and the effects boxes which added reverberation and echo to the sound of the guitar.

But rock 'n' roll music never relied on the sound of the electric guitar alone--the amplifier created the sound and the signal it received could be altered by the electronic circuits of the effect boxes. Thus the clear, high "Fender sound" heard on surf guitarist Dick Dales' records is not just the sound of his Fender Stratocaster but also of the Fender Showman or Bassman amplifier and the 6G-15 Reverb unit plugged in between guitar and amplifier. Musicians began to experiment with this technological system in their continual attempts to find new sounds. Pete Townshend of The Who was the great innovator in using all parts of the system to generate new sounds, his rapid turning on and off of the power switch on his guitar made a memorable ending to several of The Who's songs.

The man playing an electric guitar became a universally recognized image of rock 'n' roll and the instrument itself became a symbol of empowerment for a generation of teenagers who yearned for the abilities and successes of their guitar playing heroes. The myths of rock 'n' roll leaned heavily on the rags to riches tradition in the United States whereby ambitious immigrants could, with "luck and pluck," rise to the top of their profession and achieve the affluence and security of the American dream. The stories of the stars of rock 'n' roll followed this tradition and placed totemic importance on the tools of the trade: the electric guitar. Chuck Berry's "Johnny Be Goode," one of the great anthems of rock 'n' roll, tells the story of a young boy who leaves home, with only a guitar on his back, to seek out fame and fortune. This story resonated in thousands of other songs, most of which cast the hero as a guitar player.