The Guitar in Rock Music
The development of rock music depended on the
evolution and dissemination of one instrument: the guitar. Within rock culture,
the acoustic and electric versions of this instrument perform myriad functions:
a compositional and performative tool; a
symbol of an artisan aesthetic; a marker of social identity; and even a
signifier of political unconventionality. These uses and meanings, and the
popularity of the instrument itself in America, Britain and their cultural
satellites - came about for musical, semantic, cultural and practical reasons.[i]
The six-string version of
the guitar emerged in Europe at the close of the eighteenth century. It flourished
during the following hundred years, as key Italian, Spanish and other musicians,
composers and teachers expanded the guitar’s repertoire and initiated improvements in
technical method (Wade, n.d.: 68-71). The seismic transformations of the Napoleonic
wars, combined with the professional movement of important composers and instrumentalists,
precipitated the transfer of the guitar from Southern Europe to the major
musical centres of Vienna, Paris and London; it was also transported to Africa
and the Americas (Chapman, 2000: 14-31; Collins, 2004).
The advent of recording
technology, innovations in transport and travel and the mass production of
instruments enhanced the guitar’s popularity in the early twentieth century. Building
on these advances, the Spanish guitarist Segovia and his protégé John Williams
developed polyphonic performance techniques in the classical tradition; this
was a key aspect in the widening repertoire of classical guitar music in Europe
and the Americas. Acknowledging Segovia’s ongoing influence on his own musical
vision, Rory Gallagher stated:
I’m almost, if you will, into the classical
approach to the guitar like Segovia had of getting everything you can out of
the guitar by the use of all the fingers and all the means you can get.
(Rory Gallagher, quoted in Rosen, 1974: n.p.)
While
guitar music developed initially in the classical tradition, it quickly became
the instrument of choice for players in diverse cultures. The fact that it
could be tuned and played in myriad ways enabled the evolution of different
styles and modes of performance. A BBC documentary entitled The Story of the Guitar (2008)
historicizes its growing popularity outside of the classical domain. Focusing
on Anglo-American developments, it demonstrates that as early as the 1920s, the
American artist Maybelle Carter had performed country songs on a Gibson L-5 acoustic
guitar; blues musicians, including Robert Johnson, used Gibson L-1 archtop
guitars in the same decade (Chapman, 2000: 49). A nationwide American obsession
with Hawaiian ukulele music during the same period further boosted the
popularity of plucked-string instruments, while the ‘Singing Cowboy’ figure,
typified in films by Gene Autry and Leonard Franklin Slye (Roy Rogers), led to
the appearance of guitars in popular visual media (Muise, 2002; Country Music
Hall of Fame and Museum, 2011).
For
guitar makers, the instrument’s popularity lay in the fact that its constituent
materials and parts could be quickly and cheaply obtained, making
mass-production and distribution practical and profitable. For the consumer, a
guitar was financially accessible, simple to maintain and easily transportable.
As a result, the instrument was rapidly absorbed into various musical cultures.
Crucially, many migrant African-Americans adopted acoustic (and later electric)
models to express themselves and their cultural, social and biographical situtions
in music. The introduction of the guitar to black Atlantic consciousness
enabled the flowering of a conceptually vibrant and technically diverse
continuum of blues traditions in the 1920s-1950s (Jones, 1963; Palmer, 1987;
Shadwick, 2000).[ii]
The guitar was the key instrument in country blues; Charley Patton, Robert
Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy and myriad Mississippi and other musicians utilised it
to accompany their songs. Thus, fingerstyle, strummed and slide guitar
traditions in a variety of tunings emerged (Shadwick, 2000).[iii] The instrument was central
to the later emergence of Electric Blues, as John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters,
Junior Wells and Aaron ‘T-Bone’ Walker began to perform electricified
arrangments of Blues compositions to appreciative audiences in Chicago and throughout
the northern US.
The
guitar was also incorporated into jazz, as that music spread north from the
port city of New Orleans to New York, Chicago and Kansas City during the 1930s.
Charlie Christian, performing with Benny Goodman’s sextet, and Eddie Durham,
guitarist with Cab Calloway and Lester Young, pioneered the use of the electric
guitar as rhythm and lead instrument in the jazz ensemble; advances in amplification
meant that it came to occupy a principal position in the the immensely popular
big bands and swing bands of the 1940s. Concomitantly, Django Rheinhardt’s
virtuosic artistry, which mixed gyspy and jazz music, further increased the instrument’s
popularity among jazz audiences and musicians, both in the Americas and Europe.
Concurrently,
the guitar was being absorbed into performance practices associated with
Anglo-American music; it was the instrument of choice for many folk, country
and protest singers. In particular, those musicians chronicling the migrations
to California ahead of droughts in the ‘Dust Bowl’ and Great Plains regions
during the years of the Depression were drawn to the instrument; its portability
was central to its being used to express the misfortunes faced by many
migrants. The instrument would play an important role in the flowering of music
culture among the labour movements organized around union halls; it was equally
prized at the folk club gatherings (hootenannies) organised in major American
cities during the 1930s, 40s and 50s.[iv] Huddie Ledbetter, Woody
Guthrie, Bess Hawes and Bob Shane were among those who popularised the guitar as
a rhythmic and harmonic accompaniment to folk and protest songs (The New York
Times, 2009; Britannica, 2011; Kingston Trio, 2011).
The
presence of the guitar in both black and white American cultures was crucial to
the rock music’s eventual entrance into mainstream popular culture in the 1950s
and 1960s. The Story of the Guitar
documentary notes that the international chart success of Bill Haley’s
R&B-influenced ‘Rock Around the Clock’ (a US and UK No.1 single in 1954)
inspired many teenagers to purchase guitars; in TSG’s first segment, U2 guitarist The Edge likens ownership of a
guitar to possession of “a motorbike or a gun” for teenagers in the 1950s and
60s (BBC, 2009). The comparative simplicity of the instrument for performing
popular music – skiffle, R&B, basic blues and folk styles, for example –
and the instrument’s considerable potential for the execution of avdanced
techniques, made the guitar attractive to both novice and specialist players.
In Britain, Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day guitar
tutor, first published in 1957, presented guitar-playing techniques in a
simplified, accessible manner.
Technological
developments in electric guitar circuitry, amplification and solid-body design
by Les Paul, Leo Fender, their associates and competitors led to the
popularisation and mass-production of the electric guitar, beginning in the
1930s. This extended the performative and sonic potential of the acoustic
instrument significantly (Chapman, 2000). For example, through amplification,
the electric guitar became louder and more controllable in terms of volume; this
expanded the functional remit of the instrument within the ensemble, because melodic
patterns (and solos) could now be performed while accompanied by rhythm
sections that included drumkits, organs and amplified bass. Smaller and slimmer
neck and body profiles made the electric instrument easier to play during
lengthy performances (Wheeler, 2004; 55-69). Adjustable components such as
bridges, string saddles and string trees contributed to greater accuracy of
tuning. Different string gauges allowed for a greater variation in tone and
technique, while accessories such as the whammy bar (vibrato arm) enabled a
phenomenal range of pitch variations on certain models. Pick-up switch
selection, tone controls and the use of solid bodies adapted the tonal profile
of the instrument, allowing the player to achieve greater diversity between
rhythmic and melodic playing. The evolution of auxiliary effects, including distortion,
fuzz, wah, tremolo, echo, phasing, octave and delay, expanded the timbral
potential of the instrument; the manipulation of sustain and feedback, through
skillful use of amplifier and guitar, was another means by which the electric instrument
extended the sonic possibilities of its acoustic antecedent.[v]
[i] [i] Recent
research states that the modern guitar has antecedents in the instrumental
families of the Middle East (Egypt and Persia) and Mesopotamia (Chapman, 2000;
Coelho, 2003; Wade, n.d.). One theory, developing from Hornbostel and Sachs’
classification of the guitar as a composite chordophone, suggests that these
instruments arrived into early modern Europe with the Moorish invasions. They
became culturally established during the Renaissance (Guy, 2001; Wade, n.d.);
four and five-course (i.e. string) precursors were popular throughout
Mediterranean Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapman and
Wade both note that these instruments were particularly favoured by wealthy
Europeans; this is evident from religious statuary, sacred and secular
paintings and numerous surviving musical publications of the period.A four-course guitar was
one with four sets of doubled strings, similar to a modern mandolin. This
contrasts with the modern guitar, which has six single strings of diverse
pitches (EADGBE in standard tuning); see ‘Early History’, the insightful
overview, in Chapman, 2000.
[ii] The term ‘black
Atlantic’ describes a range of cultures and cultural locations of African
origin that transformed as they travelled, via the Atlantic, between Africa,
the Caribbean, Britain and the United States; I expound on the ideaand its
implications in detail in Chapter Five.
[iii] Blues describes a range of
acoustic musical styles fusing elements of the earlier practices, including
field shouts, work and folk songs, ragtime and gospel. It developed initially
in the Southern United States (in particular in the north Mississippi Delta)
and the American south east, before spreading to the industrialised north as a
cultural consequence of the Great Migration. In itself, blues culture
represents one of the major global musical innovations of the twentieth
century; blues also provided one of the essential musical foundations of the
emerging Anglo-American rock culture (Jones, 1963; Shadwick, 2000; Van der
Bliek, 2007).
[iv] The Almanac Singers, Red Dust Players and Kingston Trio are notable
examples here: see The New York Times Company (2011).
[v] Bob Dylan’s
challenge to the expectations of folk music audiences, combined with musicians’
interest in instrumental, electrified music (Dick Dale, The Ventures, Lonnie
Mack, Hank Marvin and The Shadows) also paved the way for the electrification
of rock. Dylan confounded audiences at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by
‘going electric’, performing a 15-minute set backed by a blues band featuring
electric guitars and an amplified rhythm section. See Inglis, 2006:16-28 and
Heylin, 2000: 201-22. See also Martin Scorsese’s biographical picture, No Direction Home (2005).We
can conclude, then, that the popularisation of the guitar was a key factor
enabling the phenomenal prominence of rock music and culture during the 1960s
and 1970s.
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