The story of the electric guitar is as much folklore and mythology as it is history. While the public embrace of the electric guitar, both musically and socially, is very much a phenomenon of the twentieth century, its roots go back to mid-eighteenth century Europe, and its journey to becoming a modern cultural icon includes stops in the Czech Republic, France, Hawaii, Germany, and the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. Even its history during the twentieth century is typically not well understood, with significant confusion over the people, events, and timeline of the electric guitar’s invention. This chapter examines the hidden history of the electric guitar, and puts the electric guitar’s development within the larger context of the electrification of musical instruments.

The chapter traces the long, unheralded history of Black women electric guitarists in the United States from the 1940s to the present century. It identifies the unique challenges they face striving to work in an American music landscape that adores Black women as singers but largely overlooks them when they strap an electric guitar onto their bodies. It uses historical research and oral history interviews with intergenerational artists in blues, gospel, and rock to explore how race, gender, and genre conventions manifest and intersect to create barriers and opportunities.

The release of the Fender Telecaster, Gibson Les Paul, and Fender Stratocaster in the early 1950s has led that era to assume the status of a “golden age” of electric guitar design and production. This chapter seeks to broaden the terms according to which we understand this pivotal moment through multiple lenses. First, it documents an earlier turning point in electric guitar history in the mid to late 1930s, when the Spanish-body electric ascended to prominence over its Hawaiian-style counterpart. Next, it examines the prehistory of the commercial solid body through the preproduction prototypes built by Les Paul, Leo Fender, and Paul Bigsby. Third, the chapter highlights the continued importance of hollow body electrics throughout the 1950s, in conjunction with the early years of rock ‘n’ roll. Lastly, it foregrounds the impact of low-cost electric guitars produced by companies such as Harmony and Kay, which helped make the instrument into a more accessible commodity.

Guitar shop showrooms are museums of design. As visitors walk by rows of instruments, they encounter a tactile history of popular music. However, shoppers may notice that the majority of electric guitars available in the modern marketplace are strikingly similar. While there are certainly instances of radically new styles, they are outnumbered by instruments that resemble mid-twentieth century designs, such as the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul. This chapter explores moments in electric guitar design history that speak to marketplace tensions between historical consciousness and innovation. There is a widespread belief that the electric guitar was perfected half a century ago. Therefore, new design choices must be in conversation with the past. Success stories—such as Fender’s Custom Shop series—rely upon such historical nods. Design flops—such as Gibson’s “G-Force” automatic tuner—fail because they innovate beyond what buyers are willing to accept. So, is the electric guitar dead, as some commentators have proclaimed? I argue that the instrument is in a persistent state of rebirth as new models move forwards by looking backwards.

This chapter approaches the history of electric guitar music in sub-Saharan Africa through the perspective of the “new organology,” considering the unique imbrication of materiality and sociality within the cultural work of music. Multiple local and transnational networks impact the work of guitarists, including the movement of musicians, economic systems that circulate instruments, and the circulation of musical knowledge, genre, and instrumental technique. Networks are both embedded in the landscape—such as electrical infrastructure—and lay atop the physical, such as mobile data and social media applications. The author draws upon ethnographic interviews with guitarists from Ghana and Congo to show how these networks of circulation and the materiality of instruments can provide new ways of thinking about guitar music in Africa and the African diaspora.

This chapter examines the rise of the guitar hero in the period from the mid 1960s until the early 1990s, with an emphasis on the 1970−1985 period. The “hippie aesthetic” is explored to establish the various aspects of musical ambition among guitarists that helped to make technical virtuosity a key factor in this rise. Readers’ polls primarily from Guitar Player magazine are surveyed to explore how aspiring guitarists in the 1970s and later ranked contemporary (but also historical) guitarists. These polls suggest that aspiring guitarists sometimes preferred different guitarists to those who might be most popular among the general listening public. A brief survey of modern guitar hero polls suggests that the guitar heroes of the 1970s have mostly retained their standing, though some newer ones appear in these polls and some older ones have receded.

In The Segovia Technique (1972), Vladimir Bobri describes what a guitarist’s hand gesture must be to lean toward virtuosity. This search for the perfection of the “classical” gesture was, however, called into question by another virtuosity: that of rock music. The greatest guitarists of this genre never ceased to break the rules of this ideal gesture. In the first part of the chapter, this study briefly covers the electrification of the guitar and its consequences on guitar manufacturing and the development of the effects dedicated to guitar playing. I will then focus on the possible range of crossbreeding the classically inspired instrumental gesture before addressing Eddie Van Halen’s contribution. Finally, I will consider the influence that the rock virtuosos’ legacy, from Jimi Hendrix to Van Halen, brought to the instrumental gesture, and the tones used by composers of contemporary repertoire whose knowing use of technique has furthered the hybridization of genres.

During the twentieth century, the electric guitar rose to what Waksman (2001) has described as a “position of relative supremacy in the instrumental hierarchy of popular music” due in part to its ability to function effectively within and across the four textural layers present in popular music. While much of the stylistic research surrounding the electric guitar to date has focused on the lead guitar and its players due to the musical and cultural agency ascribed to the role, the aim of this chapter is to examine the electric rhythm guitar in popular music. The chapter offers a review of the literature and current knowledge surrounding the rhythm guitar and briefly discusses the often problematic divisions of labor between rhythm and lead playing. The chapter then assesses varied approaches to rhythm playing taken by electric guitar practitioners on key recordings from the genres of jazz, blues, R&B, rock and roll, funk, and disco. Rather than reinforcing an assumed binary opposition of lead and rhythm guitar functions, the chapter argues for a consideration of a rhythm-lead guitar spectrum/continuum supported by an assessment of the case studies presented in the chapter.

This chapter considers how the electric guitar is entwined with ecological issues—materially, culturally, and politically. Its first section discusses the electric guitar’s composite materials—metals, plastics, and especially woods—linking them to upstream impacts, legal and environmental conflicts. Disrupting the industry are environmental problems that interrupt material resource supply, including species endangerments, trade restrictions, and climate change. The second section considers new sustainability initiatives amid growing resource insecurity and a changing climate. Attempts at ecological recuperation encompass diversification of timbers, forest restoration, salvage supply chains, new materials, and urban tree planting schemes. The third section turns to guitar players, asking questions of how, as musicians, we find ourselves entwined within, and in many ways responsible for, the instrument’s ecological dilemmas. Throughout the chapter, we draw upon our long-standing research project tracing the guitar “in rewind” back to forest origins, including interview quotes from wood experts in the guitar industry that we have interviewed across the globe.

This chapter provide an overview of the ways that the bass guitar is most often used in popular music. Rather than discuss the instrument in terms of genre, I focus instead on its wider musical functions. As I argue, bass lines can largely be categorized by five common performative strategies: basic accompaniments, rhythmic- and groove-oriented approaches, melodic-oriented approaches, slap and pop styles, and the use of alternative instruments and techniques. While these strategies frequently overlap, this simplified taxonomy is intended to help listeners better appreciate how the bass shapes the overall sound and feel of a recording. By using a diverse cross-section of examples drawn from classic rock, metal, pop, R&B, soul, funk, reggae, disco, jazz, hip hop, and more, this chapter also highlights bass guitarists’ profound, wide-ranging impact on music history.

Guitar playing styles have gradually, albeit substantially, changed over time. The new millennium in particular brought a fundamental change in playing techniques, primarily due to technological advances such as extended-range guitars. Established techniques were adapted to new instrument designs and their use in progressive musical styles. This chapter introduces novel approaches to melodic playing in three areas of progressive rock subgenres: percussive techniques, tapping, and using the thumb. The analysis of contemporary techniques includes adaptations from the electric bass that inspired thumping, slapping, and popping techniques. Concerning tapping, traditional shred tapping is complemented by forms of pianistic multi-finger and multi-role tapping, as well as percussive glitch and butterfly tapping. Finally, examining thumb use demonstrates that the picking-hand thumb is now involved in techniques such as under-strumming. The chapter shows how these techniques are used in progressive rock and metal, where virtuosity is expected and where guitarists must actively explore unique ways of playing to distinguish themselves from other skilled players.