Over the course of music history, perhaps no instrument has been more influential in the crafting songs than the guitar. I don’t recall Bryan Adams bragging about his “first real oboe” back in the Summer of ’69. Particularly in American music throughout the twentieth century, with perhaps a brief hiatus in the forgotten disco era, the guitar has been an instrumental staple in classic songs for generations. Country, rock, blues, whatever your genre, it’s tough to create hit song in the pre-auto tune era without at least a little bass bringing up the back.
For all music lovers who appreciate a little twang in their rhythm, ancient Asian and Indian civilization deserves a simple thank you. These elementary instruments gave us the basics that would later form the modern guitar, including a long neck, flat wooden face/back and curved sides. Much of the string instrument family is descended from these age old musical apparatuses, a reason why sitars, tanburs and instruments across various cultures today look like a guitar’s long lost cousin.
In more recent history, the acoustic guitar has been a prominent element of music in America since the well before the beginning of recording artists and radio play, but the 1930′s saw a drastic change in the instrument’s place in music history, forever altering the rock n’ roll landscape. Prior to 1931, traditional acoustic guitars were the main jam in jam sessions across the country, however, when George Beauchamp developed the first electrically amplified axe, acoustic’s days atop the music scene were soon numbered. Gibson, Audiovox, Bakelite, among other prominent music companies, began marketing the first mass-produced lines of electric guitars by the mid-30′s.
1950 saw the extremely successful Fender Esquire solid-body electric guitar, helping the new look instrument gain pop-culture recognition from a consumer standpoint. Of course, the history of the electric guitar is still being written. The 60′s and 70′s gave the world countless updates in terms of amplifiers effects and capabilities. Ultimately, instrument innovation is only as mind and speaker blowing as the talented musicians who play them. The same decades that gave us legendary bass-slappers and axe-choppers, from Paul McCartney to Jimi Hendrix, also gave us a means to produce sound from string like now ears had ever heard before.
Like fashion, guitar history, styling and sound will never fully mature, instead circling and adapting based on skill and audience preference. Music is an art, capable of compelling millions of listeners across the globe, and the guitar is just a tool by which to express oneself. With a pick in one hand, a tuned-in ear and an open mind, today could be just another day in storied music history.
