Introduction

Playing electric blues guitar is extremely competitive. It is part of the tradition. In Austin, Texas, where I started my recording career, that tradition was strong, and the players were fierce. You had to be able to play assertively and aggressively to be heard and to get your point across. By twenty-one, I’d already been on the road for years, coming up through biker bars in the Canadian Prairies and playing one-nighters across the US. I was aware of having to stake my claim, and I was also hyper-aware of being different, of my female-ness. At that time, there were not many women lead guitarists out there, so I always noticed when one came into my sight. I kept track of them as I went along.

In 2001, I began interviewing many of these female guitarists. Over the next decade, I interviewed more than a hundred prominent guitar women. This exercise was quite an education for me personally, as I came to understand the perspectives of my musical peers. I believe that virtually all of my interview subjects also found it therapeutic to articulate their thoughts on their experiences—for many of them, this was the first instance where they were asked to reflect on their journey. This chapter encompasses my own encounters as well as a summary of the perspectives of my interviewees on their time in the music industry and their encounters with the guitar. These are excerpts from my upcoming book, Guitar Woman.

Modern guitar women are now more visible as influential players. In 2017, Guitar Player magazine declared that women have made a tremendous contribution to guitar culture. In recognition of this influence, Guitar Player magazine dedicated one of its fiftieth-anniversary editions to an alphabetical list of the top fifty female players, across time and genre. I was honored to be among those players, and I was gratified in knowing that I had interviewed and researched well over 80 percent of the women still living who were on this list.¹

Additionally, over the past twenty years that I have been studying guitar women, the long-standing number and status of female players has undergone a significant transformation. As a young girl in love with the guitar, I could name all the female players I knew on one hand. When I began my professional career, the scene started to blossom. These days, each time I refresh my social media feeds, I am inundated with photos and videos of women of all ages, varied backgrounds, musical genres, and cultures, shredding on the guitar. At this point, it no longer seems like a big deal to see a woman really play. I believe we have moved past that. What has kept this project relevant to me is the fact that these changes occurred because of the women who blazed the trails. The path is undoubtedly easier now because of them.

Role Models and Trailblazers

In the late 1930s, three women were among the very first electric guitarists: rockin’ gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member, who is credited with the first rock and roll song (“Strange Things Happening Every Day,” 1946) and has a song in the Library of Congress (“Down By The Riverside,” 1958);² swing and bebop jazz guitarist Mary Osborne, the only prominent female jazz guitarist from 1940 to 1960; and blues singer and guitarist Memphis Minnie, one of my biggest heroes, who also has a song in the Library of Congress (“Me & My Chauffeur Blues,” 1941). Discovering Memphis Minnie was one of the most impactful events of my music career. At barely sixteen years old, I began my lifelong love affair with her and the mythology that shrouded her life.

In 1910, at age thirteen, Minnie began hitchhiking the seventeen miles from her family farm to Memphis to busk on Beale Street. After a few years of this, she spent three years with the Barnum & Bailey Circus working on her stage act. She eventually went back to Memphis, and along with her husband, Kansas Joe McCoy, she started her recording career. Minnie and Kansas Joe moved to Chicago in 1930. They recorded relentlessly until the couple divorced in 1934. By 1938, Minnie was fronting a power trio with her commanding voice and aggressive electric guitar. This was the genesis of modern electric Chicago blues.

Minnie was known to be rough and tough in the bars and on the streets, quick with a knife and a pistol, and even a guitar if she needed to hit you with it. On stage, she was known to go head-to-head with the best of her male counterparts. Big Bill Broonzy tells³ of engaging with Memphis Minnie in the very first guitar-cutting contest in 1933! It was held at 1:30 am in South Side, Chicago, in a large hall filled with black and white spectators. The sidewalk and street outside were crowded with fans competing for scarce window views of the contest. It was judged by Sleepy John Estes, Tampa Red, and Richard M. Jones. After two songs each, Minnie won the prize of a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of gin. Minnie also had cutting contests with others, such as Jimmy Rogers and Muddy Waters. Minnie always won. Every time.

This story showed me that Minnie embraced all that was involved in being a badass guitar player. She dug her heels in, and she did what the guys were doing. The culture of competitiveness that comes with playing lead guitar has been going on from the start. If you get in the ring, you better be ready to battle. Minnie defined her right to be in the ring decades before any mention of equal rights for women. She did it with skill and grit.

Several of my interview subjects report finding Memphis Minnie later in their careers. Alice Stuart, the only female guitarist to be a member of The Mothers of Invention, describes her discovery of Minnie:

Slide guitarist Ellen McIlwaine describes how Minnie and others were not available role models:

Influences

Without available role models, how and by whom were prominent female guitarists influenced to begin and sustain careers? Personally, I was drawn to the guitar partly through the influence of my family and by the culture at the time.

The 1970s, when I was a child, was the era of the guitar god. The instrument was woven into the fabric of the culture. My older brothers were guitarists, as was my father. The guitar was a symbol of the power of expression in my father’s hands while he strummed traditional Irish folk songs and ballads. Even more, though, the power of the instrument was conveyed through the loud guitar-driven rock and roll that my brothers blasted from their rooms—Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones. As a young girl, I would slip into my oldest brother’s room and gaze at the posters on his wall. There was Jimmy Page in his Merlin suit, his Les Paul extended from his crotch, and Hendrix with his white Stratocaster raised up to the heavens while stadiums of fans looked on, mesmerized. I was a tomboy, and I was barely aware of being different from my brothers. I was also musically inclined, so it seemed completely natural that I would play guitar too.

Most of the women I interviewed were drawn to the guitar through many of the same avenues as their male counterparts. Particularly significant to my interview subjects were live televised performances of popular musicians on Ed Sullivan’s prime time Sunday night variety show. This show ran from 1948 to 1971, providing visibility to hundreds of musicians along the way. Suzi Quatro recalls:

Alice Stuart and Barbara Lynn echo Suzy Quatro, describing their introduction to rock and roll:

Another episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, when The Beatles made their American debut, also inspired many women to pick up guitars and start bands.

Self-Creation: Suzi Quatro

Before Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde, and countless other women donned leather pants and electric guitars, there was Suzi Quatro. Like millions of fans in the 1970s, I first knew Suzi through her character, Leather Tuscadero, on the sitcom Happy Days. She entered my consciousness like a freight train at full speed. I did not know I had been waiting for her, but when she appeared, it all made sense. Suzi did not look like the other females I saw in music. She seemed like a down-to-earth, tough girl who could handle herself in a man’s world. She dressed in black leather, played the hell out of the bass, and held her own with a group of rough Detroit dudes. It was not until I saw Suzi Quatro that I felt a life playing the guitar could actually be mine. Suzi did not just create a personal identity. She created an archetype—“the rock chick.” When I interviewed Suzi several years back, I was struck by her seriousness as a player, her humility, and her outspoken opinions on female musicians. I love how she holds us all accountable to master our instruments.

Quatro describes her early years in isolation, which spurred her to create something new:

When I asked Quatro whether there were any female influences in her early days, she spoke frankly, “No. None.”

The Go-Go’s bassist, Kathy Valentine, remembers something stirring in her when she saw Suzi Quatro perform for the first time.

The Proving Ground

Every time a player walks on stage, they are proving themself on some level, no matter how unknown or established they are. That is normal and to be expected for males and for females. But when I was starting out, there were so few women lead electric guitar players on the circuit that I was extra sensitive to the attitudes of the audience and, sometimes, of the other musicians beside me on stage. I was slight, petite, and I always looked years younger than my age. No one expected that I was going to rip on guitar, so I would often get suspicious looks, attitudes, and catcalls from the audience like “Show us your tits,” “Chick thinks she can play,” or some other base remark. As a result, I sometimes overcompensated and acted more aggressively than I needed to. I felt like I had to make a statement. I had to make them see that I was here to really play, and that I was not fucking around. I bought a hundred-watt Fender amp and a hundred-foot guitar cable, and I would walk through the club playing my solos in everyone’s faces. I played behind my head. I played with my teeth and behind my back. I played long, loud solos. I would drown out their catcalls with volume and with balls. At the end of the set, the same rough dudes who had been sneering at me would be lined up wanting to buy me shots.

Many of the women I interviewed spoke of having to prove themselves in some aspect of their careers. Some of the challenges were based on people not expecting them to be able to handle the instrument; others were based around exclusion from radio airplay, or professional competitiveness. Ellen McIlwaine, the Goddess of Slide, speaks forcefully of the pressures of the music business on the young, upcoming female guitarist.

Ellen started out playing acoustic guitar in Greenwich Village in 1966. Soon she was meeting and jamming with legends such as Jimi Hendrix, Mississippi John Hurt, and Odetta Holmes. Only a few years later, she was signed by Polydor and gained cult status from her solo albums Honky Tonk Angel (1972) and We the People (1973). By the late 1970s, Ellen was venturing into the world of electric lead guitar. She continued touring and, at one point, joined forces with Jack Bruce and Paul Wertico on her album, Everybody Needs It (1982).

When I was coming up, I did not know any females who played with the kind of ferocity of Ellen McIlwaine. What I did not realize then, and only came to understand after speaking with Ellen, were the hardships she had gone through as a young female guitarist trying to establish herself. Ellen opened up about the struggles with self-esteem she endured as an emerging artist.

After Lita Ford left The Runaways, she launched out on her own as a heavy metal guitar shredder. Ford speaks of the lack of recognition and acceptance shown to female guitarists. The general presumption from those that heard her band was that she was not really the lead guitarist on her solo albums.

Joan Armatrading, who is mainly known as a singer-songwriter but has been playing lead guitar her entire career, describes a similar misconception:

Vicki Peterson of The Bangles spoke about how radio stations were reluctant to play too many girl group records.

There were few female guitar role models in the mid 1960s when Alice Stuart’s career took off.

Jennifer Batten broke out like a supernova in the late 1980s as the lead guitarist for Michael Jackson when he was at the height of his fame. Until she arrived, the idea of a woman shredding lead guitar in pop music was almost unheard of. There had only been a few before her, most notably Lita Ford. Ford was better known in the heavy metal realm, though, than in mainstream pop music.

Michael Jackson seemed to delight at featuring Jennifer Batten in his videos and live concerts. When I watch those videos now, I still get a little breathless at the level of excitement of Jackson and the audience when Jennifer rips into her solos. She came out so strong, riffing Eddie Van Halen licks, double-tapping, and playing at lightning speed. She broke through the glass ceiling, and she proved at that moment that there should be no delineation between men and women as far as technical virtuosity on the instrument goes.

Jennifer Batten talked about the cutthroat competitiveness of the music business and the attitudes she got early on from other players.

Jennifer’s first solo album, Above Below and Beyond (1992), featured her version of the classical composition, “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which she played at a breathtaking speed, showing off her agility and virtuosity. It was clear that she was proving herself as one of the top-tier players on the scene. It reminded me that we all have to establish ourselves in the proving ground, and for women who undertake this line of work, often extra measures are required.

Forty years before Batten worked with Michael Jackson, Mary Osborne became the subject of a legendary proving-ground tale of her audition with Joe Venuti. Mary quickly surprised the bandleader with the depth of her abilities.

In 1942, jazz violinist Joe Venuti was looking for a flashy guitar player for his stage show, featuring singer Kay Starr and The Andrews Sisters. He agreed to give the twenty-one-year-old Mary Osborne an audition as a courtesy. Speculation at the time was that Venuti was not wholly serious about it but rather was treating it like a joke, a chance to teach the young girl how “real” musicians play. The resulting episode was described in detail in a retrospective article in Vintage Guitar magazine, with input from Osborne’s son, Ralph Scaffidi, Jr.:

Carol Kaye started out as a jazz guitarist before she became one of the world’s most renowned bass players and session musicians. She spoke of the high stakes and expectations that an average bebop musician worked under. The fact that she was fourteen when she started gigging was an astounding testimony to her talent and drive.

Lita Ford spoke not only of being ahead of her time but also of the lengths she went to establish herself in the 1980s heavy metal scene.

When I asked Ford about her use of the double neck guitar, which was another first for a female, she said, “Yeah, that’s my baby. That’s another thing that I thought would be different. I really jumped into the fire full force.”

The Poetic Nature of Female Expression

I was nine years old when Heart’s Little Queen (1977) was released. Of the two Wilson sisters, I immediately identified with Nancy, the fair-haired beauty who played the guitar. Nancy Wilson began playing acoustic and moved to electric as her career evolved. She has mainly played rhythm guitar in Heart and in her own solo career. Nancy shared some insights on what could be considered feminine attributes to playing.

Undoubtedly, there are many ways to express oneself on the instrument, and being female does not necessarily mean playing “like a female.” But, if we consider what are traditionally thought of as feminine characteristics, elements such as receptivity, gentleness, creativity, and supportiveness might come into play. And perhaps the willingness to sacrifice one’s ego for the greater good. These attributes are not delineated by the sexes, as I have witnessed many women who play very aggressively, and I have also witnessed many men who play with great sensitivity and tenderness. Based on my experiences playing with groups of men, all-female groups, and mixed bands, I would argue that most female guitarists feel at ease in a supportive role and are not overly concerned with showing others up or conquering another musician on the bandstand—unless provoked, in which case, all bets are off!

Alice Stuart described using the instrument like a voice. This approach carries the theme of the music forward without the need for over-playing and pyrotechnics. She also stresses the importance of bolstering the other musicians on stage.

Kathy Valentine has been working as a musician for over forty years. She started her first band in Austin at the age of sixteen. By her early twenties, Kathy had moved to Los Angeles to launch her music career. By a chance encounter in a public bathroom with The Go-Go’s guitarist Charlotte Caffey, she was asked to join an up-and-coming all-female band. Kathy became the bass player of the group, but she also wrote and co-wrote some of the band’s most memorable songs, such as “Vacation” (1982) and “Head Over Heels” (1984). The Go-Go’s were signed to IRS in 1981, and they recorded their debut album, Beauty and The Beat (1981). Together, they made history as the first all-female band to have a number-one album in the United States. In 2021, The Go-Go’s became the first all-female band to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Kathy has since gone on to front several other all-female bands based in Austin, Texas, most notably, The Bluebonnets, which also features Austin guitar slinger Eve Monsees. Kathy explains her passion for playing in all-female ensembles.

Breaking Through to Wide Acceptance

I was in my early twenties and just about to record my first album when Bonnie Raitt was dominating the Billboard music charts and taking home multiple Grammy Awards. As a young, white, blues-playing female guitarist, I considered myself unique. That is until I realized Bonnie had been doing the same thing decades before me.

Bonnie seemed to have the perfect balance of singer/songwriter and instrumentalist. She did not shred on the guitar, but instead, she used well-crafted slide solos to accentuate her songs and her singing. The overall effect was a gentler approach than Jennifer Batten and Lita Ford’s “in your face” guitar domination stance. It was more digestible for the average audience. Even though she played in an understated style, Bonnie’s guitar work was sublime. Her tone, phrasing, and technique all managed to accentuate her dynamic vocals and great songs. She hit the sweet spot.

Bonnie has won ten Grammys and was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy. Guitarist magazine put her in a handful of the top electric guitar players ever,⁶ along with Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Derek Trucks. Her album, Nick of Time (1989), is in the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress. She is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

When I spoke with Bonnie, I remarked on her influence on women in guitar. Bonnie handled that issue with humility and confidence.

Bonnie was mentored by many legendary blues-playing men and women, and she built lasting friendships with strong, outspoken female blues and R&B icons such as Ruth Brown and Sippie Wallace. Because she began learning her craft during the 1960s folk and protest movement, she did not feel isolated in her quest to be a lead guitarist. It turned out that playing lead guitar was the thing that set her apart and got her noticed.

Bonnie Raitt is a prime example of why role models make such a difference for females trying to find their place in the world of guitar culture. Bonnie’s commercial success changed the perceptions of what a multi-Grammy award-winning pop artist was. Suddenly, that person could be a middle-aged, down-to-earth, politically outspoken female lead guitar player. It was one for the team. For the many women I spoke with who felt alone and marginalized, there are also exceptions, like Bonnie, who managed their way through the terrain with relative ease and grace, and who made it to the top.

Felicia Collins had one of the most high-profile gigs in the world from 1993 to 2015, playing lead guitar five nights a week on national network television in the house band led by Paul Shaffer on Late Night with David Letterman. When I observed Felicia on Late Night, I always thought that she seemed very comfortable in her skin. She smiled a lot, and she looked like she owned her place on the bandstand. Paul Shaffer’s band included some of the top players in New York City. By the time Felicia got that gig, there were already many women breaking through on the instrument, but I believe that just the presence of a woman doing this night after night with millions watching had a huge impact. Felicia brushed off my affirmation of this point, stating that it was more about the time in history.

When we spoke, she reiterated the fact that being female was not at all a hardship, but instead honestly said it was a blessing that got her a lot of opportunities.

Passing the Torch

Finding Memphis Minnie when I was sixteen changed my life and gave me a great sense of comfort. Until I knew about Minnie, I felt alone on my journey and, in many ways, rudderless. The more women guitar players that I discovered through the years, the more I realized I had never been alone. There had been all these supernovas orbiting around me the whole time. My intention with my interviews was simply to learn about what their journeys had been like and how they related to my own. Many of these women players opened up to me in ways they might not have done to a journalist, and I sensed that they had a strong urge to leave behind their stories and wisdom to support the next generation of females who ventured on this path.

In the mid 1960s, June and Jean Millington were forming the first all-female band to release an album on a major label⁷ and one of the first to achieve Top 40 success on the Billboard Hot 100.⁸ Their band, The Sveltes, later called Fanny, signed with Warner Brothers and released their debut album, Fanny, in 1970. Despite this success, June resisted the label’s suggestions that Fanny should adopt a more hard-rock persona, the better to prove that chicks could kick ass, she says sarcastically. So, after four albums with Fanny, including one that broke the Top 40, June decided to leave the band. She describes the efforts expended to gain little traction.

After decades spent studying Buddhism and spirituality, June immersed herself into being a role model for upcoming female players. In 1986, along with her life partner Ann Hackler, June Millington cofounded the Institute for Musical Arts (IMA) with the aim of supporting women and girls in music. The institution’s launch immediately drew the attention of notable women in the music industry, including Bonnie Raitt, who sat on the advisory board. Today, the institute is still active as a multicultural nonprofit teaching and performing arts organization, with June serving as Artistic Director.

June spoke about the concept of “direct transmission”⁹ and how she strives to teach her female students to seek a deeper experience in music. She brings forth the gifts she received as a young musician in 1960s Los Angeles.

When I spoke with Joan Armatrading in 2007, she had just been named President of the UK-based charity Women of The Year.¹⁰ Joan made strong arguments for supporting women and for teaching young women to be confident and assertive about their abilities.

Rock ’n’ Roll Camp for Girls/The Path Forward

In 2018, Fender made national headlines when it released a study that stated that 50 percent of guitar buyers were now women. That study astounded many people and brought to light what has been in the works for decades. There are now also magazines devoted entirely to female guitarists as well as dozens, if not hundreds, of all-female rock camps¹¹ and organizations around the world that support women and girls in their quest to be guitar players.

Up Above My Head: Sister Rosetta Tharpe

One of the things I marvel at when I watch old videos of Sister Rosetta Tharpe is the sheer joy she exudes in performing and playing her guitar. She is unapologetically putting everything out there, her strident lead guitar solos, her forceful vocals, and her moves, guitar windmills, and duck walking. With an unbridled spirit, she owns her place on the bandstand. There is no defensiveness to Rosetta’s approach. It is pure expression coming straight from the source. Rosetta was an astoundingly great musician, and I highly doubt that there was anyone saying, “She’s good for a girl.”

Music travels through time and space. It’s in the air that we breathe. Music holds no delineations. It does not care whose ears it reaches. There are no boundaries with music. There are no classes. There are no genders. Upon hearing a piece of guitar music, if you were to close your eyes, would you know if the guitarist playing the solo was male or female? Audibly, most would not be able to delineate between the genders. Even a trained ear might not pick up on the subtleties. However, if you were to see the performer of the guitar solo, and it was a woman, how would you feel? Empowered, excited, and turned on? Or confused, repelled, and uncomfortable? How about conflicted? From my experiences and from the stories I’ve gathered, I know that few are indifferent.

Historical Overview: Black Women in the United States

Black women occupy a distinctive social location in the United States. They are Black, and they are women. As such, they embody two simultaneous identities that are dynamic but also historically marginalized. Since enslavement in the United States, Black women have experienced trenchant limitations on their abilities to define and represent themselves, improve their life chances, and freely engage in self-expression. Prevailing constructs of femininity framed as piety and purity were reserved for the protection and security of only white women. By contrast, Black women were subjected to stereotypes created by the dominant white society that intentionally distorted them as desexualized Mammies and oversexualized Jezebels, not worthy of protection or consideration of any kind.¹ In spite of ongoing legacies of racism, racial segregation, and sexism, Black women nonetheless found ways to propel themselves into a vibrant resistance seeking liberated and self-generated representations. To that end, entertainment became a significant field for Black women’s labor through artistic expression. An ability to sing, in particular, emerged as a viable way to broaden the landscape of lives that would otherwise have been limited to low-paying, backbreaking jobs as sharecroppers or as domestic servants for whites—positions proscribed as the domain of Black women in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century America.²

Within this crucible, the singing Black woman in the United States forged a storied representational legacy. She is seen and reigns supreme—dominating the American cultural landscape with indisputable critical and popular success across decades in genres such as blues, jazz, R&B, soul, gospel, and pop. Everyone understands that this is Black women’s place in music.

But let a singing Black woman strap an electric guitar onto her body, and she becomes displaced, a fact that is particularly appalling because Black women have a long legacy playing the electric guitar across genres and eras since Memphis Minnie and Sister Rosetta Tharpe ostensibly became the first two Black women to pick up the instrument in the 1930s and 1940s. Documenting the existence of this overlooked history reveals the perils and promises of Black women’s long engagement with the instrument. It also reveals how Black women electric guitarists are uniquely situated at a complex, contradictory intersection of race, gender, and genre with regard to the electric guitar. The following offers a concise survey of select Black women electric guitarists and their achievements across the genres of rock and roll, blues, and gospel, taking an intersectional approach to understanding the arc of their careers, the hurdles they faced, and the need to insert them into existing histories of popular music.

Black Women and the Electric Guitar: A Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight

The electric guitar is a culturally iconic instrument in the United States, crucial to evolutions and innovations in blues and rock music especially. Playing electric guitar is typically represented as a masculine activity in popular culture and in much literature, both popular and academic. In this music-making meta-narrative, men are the great guitar players, elevated as the primary creators and innovators of blues (in particular, Black men) and of rock (in particular, white men), with the electric guitar serving as a signifier of ecstatic male sexuality and virility.³

A Stony Road to Trod

Sister Outsiders? Images and Expectations

Black women who choose to perform outside mainstream understandings of their place in music (through genre, instrument, or musical configuration) can face cognitive dissonance from people who do not expect them to have such a broad range of artistic ability and interest because Black women’s representational legacy as vocalists and their representational legacy within genres like R&B are so entrenched.³⁶ BB Queen said:

Similarly, for Bliss, people assume “all the time” that she is anything but the guitar player. “My guitar is right there, and they say, ‘So you sing background?’”³⁸ Suzanne Thomas said people would see her with her band and assumed there had to be another—male—electric guitarist yet to come because “this band absolutely could not possibly function … on the strength of one guitar player who’s a female.” They looked at her as if to ask, “‘Well, when is the [real] guitar player going to get here?’ They always assume that as a female you’re only playing rhythm or acoustic guitar.”³⁹

Bliss, who trained in jazz playing in her undergraduate’s now-defunct jazz ensemble in the 1990s, takes pride in her versatility, especially in being able to play the electric guitar—not the acoustic guitar, which she can also play. She said: “I’ve always kind of had a chip on my shoulder [when people assume she only plays acoustic guitar]. I just don’t think I’m the kind of person that can be satisfied with playing three-chord songs or not being able to go into a jam session and just be like, ‘What!’”⁴⁰

Black women electric guitarists understand that making music, being creative, and seeking a way to be self-sufficient is a challenge for all women, regardless of race. And it is true that, regardless of race, many women electric guitarists share similar experiences of biased treatment based on gender within often oversexualized, hyper-masculine environments as professional artists seeking serious attention to their skill.

However, for Black women, their race is not divisible from their gender because Black women electric guitarists uniquely confront both gender and racial discrimination due to “a racialized, sexualized and exploitative history”⁴¹ that has resulted in Black women and their bodies becoming “systematically overdetermined and mythically configured.”⁴² Within this discourse of racialized femininity, Black women have been and continue to be marked and misconstrued as excessive and/or masculine, inherently and overtly sexual, voluminously loud, overweight, and brash in bodily deportment. By contrast, white women experience presumptions of their beauty and femininity that have never been accorded to Black women with or without an electric guitar.

Bliss, who was once signed to a contract with Arista Records in the 1990s when she was lead guitarist of a Black female rock band whose initial record company enthusiasm gave way to marketing malaise, says, “There is a pressure for women professionals to look a certain way, in order to be taken seriously, regardless of what their profession is, especially for those that are in show business. And if you’re Black, it’s all the more challenging. Black women’s beauty is not celebrated the same way white women’s beauty is.” She further expressed a deep concern for “what that does for the self-esteem of the woman, the Black woman in particular, because, as Americans, there’s a beauty standard that we’ll never meet.”⁴³ Bliss continues:

These kinds of interrelated issues of gender, race, and genre are things, Bliss observes, “Susan Tedeschi never has to deal with.”⁴⁵

Conclusion

The trail Memphis Minnie and Sister Rosetta Tharpe created is incontrovertibly and distinctively well-traveled. Two contemporary artists, in particular, have been able to reach career peaks in the form of popular success: Gabriella “H.E.R.” Wilson (b. 1997) and Brittany Howard (b. 1998) of the Alabama Shakes. Since her 2017 self-titled debut R&B album, H.E.R. has collected multiple Grammys, an Emmy Award, and an Academy Award for her music. At Tina Turner’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2021, H.E.R. performed a Turner tribute on electric guitar. Howard, too, has garnered multiple Grammy Awards and critical acclaim for her southern rock, where she has hewed out a space that she is all too aware has been exclusive. In 2020, without the Alabama Shakes, she became the first Black woman electric guitarist as a solo artist to be nominated in the Best Rock Performance category for the Grammys, an award she won with the band in 2016 (a feat because the award is dominated by white male musicians). In 2018, Howard and Felicia Collins performed at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony for Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

It was a gratifying full-circle moment: two intergenerational, professional, electric-guitar-playing Black women from different backgrounds and eras showcasing their skills while paying homage to the accomplishments of one of their pioneer predecessors. Seeing them together on stage with a montage of Tharpe images cycling behind them evoked a visceral sense of the cultural imperative of Black women playing the electric guitar.

Weighed down by the gendered and racialized bias of the instrument that has segregated and stereotyped them because they are Black women, Howard and Collins used the iconic instrument to disrupt, at least for the moment, cultural fantasies of the electric guitar as the purview of whiteness and maleness while challenging narrow expectations of Black women’s musical capabilities and interests. They displayed a symbolic connection and material contribution to propagating African American musical traditions that make the electric guitar their heritage too. That evening they laid public claim to being contemporary inheritors of the long legacy of Black women electric guitarists in the United States.

Introduction

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, and legal and environmental conflicts. To purists, Leo Fender’s 1950s Telecaster captures the electric guitar’s rock ’n’ roll sensibility—an unpretentious “slab” of swamp ash and a maple neck, bolted together with a thick metal bridge plate and straightforward pickups, in utilitarian simplicity. In the seven decades since, electric guitar makers have brought together more luxurious materials—mahoganies (Swietenia spp.), rosewoods (Dalbergia spp.), ebonies (Diospyros spp.), koa (Acacia koa)—linking increasingly scarce materials with wider colonial legacies. Now troubling the industry are a suite of 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 we, as musicians, find ourselves entwined within, and in many ways responsible for, the instrument’s ecological dilemmas. Beyond matters of the electric guitar’s material components are the visceral relatings that unfurl between players, the instrument, and the upstream sources of physical materials. 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 since 2014. Any direct quotes otherwise not attributed elsewhere result from this primary research.¹

Ecological Origins

Electric guitars are made from diverse, matter-of-fact materials brought together in factories and workshops—principally metals, plastics, and woods—and to a lesser extent, bone and tortoiseshell, as well as new experimental substitutes such as carbon fibers and micarta (a resin-based composite of canvas, paper, linen, and fiberglass, increasingly used in place of ebony for fretboards). For musicians and music fans, the electric guitar is a symbol of postwar global cultural homogenization—rock ’n’ roll music and (Americanized) popular culture. The globe is, in another sense, captured within the guitar itself—in the very mix of substances brought together in its manufacture.

Understanding the ecological dimensions of electric guitars thus requires knowledge of the whereabouts of these materials and associated upstream environmental, social, and labor impacts. Metals used in guitars range from stainless steel and nickel for frets and strings (and to a lesser extent, cobalt, titanium, and chrome); copper wire in pickup winding; aluminum, nickel, and cobalt in pickup magnets (the famed “al-ni-co” alloy); zinc alloys, chrome, and steel in machine heads (tuning pegs); and steel for bridges and Stratocaster-style tremolo blocks. Brass—an alloy of copper and zinc long known for its sonorous qualities on labrosones (trumpets, horns, saxophones)—also features on higher-end tuners, nuts, frets, and bridges. Each of these metal elements has its own set of environmental issues, from localized mining impacts upon local populations, landscapes, waterways, and air quality, to wider “earth shaping” processes such as colonialism, capitalism, and the ethical problems of extractivism—whereby western mining companies treat dispersed distant places not as communities in which to invest for the longer term, but as “resource banks” to exploit for profit.²

Plastics, used in scratch plates, tuner and pickup casings, nuts, and knobs, bring their own ecological entanglements. Being petrochemical products, guitar plastics are linked to fossil fuels and places of oil extraction and distribution, from Mississippi to the Middle East, Russia to Singapore, Indonesia to Venezuela.³ Encased in your electric guitar’s volume knob or pickguard are remnants of these distant places—molecular residues from fossilized organic matter deposited deep in the earth millions of years prior. Problems of fossil fuels use are well known, from air and water pollution to climate change, chemical leaching, and runoff into water catchments, alongside political implications including dependencies on oil-exporting autocratic regimes, and the disempowerment and racial discrimination of labor.⁴ While the amounts of metals or plastics in an electric guitar might be infinitesimal compared with larger consumer and industrial goods, they share connections to these dispersed environmental and social problems.

More conspicuous are the ecological entanglements concerning the woods from which electric guitars are made. The science of wood properties and norms of acoustics and aesthetics designate which species are best for guitar making. For acoustic guitars, the soundboard is critical, with only a narrow range of species, such as spruces (Picea spp.) and cedar (Cedrela odorata), able to combine acoustic quality, workability, vitreousness (reverberation), beauty, and structural strength. While for electric guitars, wood choice might be less important—given the influence of pickup type and windings, effects pedals, string, nut and fret metals, and amp preferences—there are similar norms of manufacture, sound, and appearance. Guitarists describe certain instruments as having a “good feel”—referring both to the texture of wood under fingers, and the overall reverberating qualities of the instrument body. A proficient player can hear and describe the sonic qualities of swamp ash (Fraxinus spp.) versus mahogany, or distinctions between maple (Acer spp.) and rosewood necks. Ebony fingerboards feel slinkier than grainier rosewood. The former contributes to a denser, mid-range sound; the latter to a warmer, open tonal combination. The Telecaster’s maple neck imparts a brightness in combination with the bridge pickup that cannot be replicated using other species. As guitar makers and players have developed and tested new models and agreed on preferred combinations, a heightened awareness of the material and acoustic properties of trees has evolved.

This awareness binds all forms of guitar manufacture—acoustic and electric—to global timber supply chains. In electric guitars, the most common include: alders (Alnus spp.), swamp ash, and mahogany for bodies; maple, mahogany, and walnut (Juglans nigra) for necks; and maple, ebony, and rosewood for fingerboards. Each wood has its distinctive route from forest to factory, as the wood passes through many hands—those of forest managers, sawmillers, truckers, and barge operators, and guitar-making workforces (from dedicated wood shop staff to machinists and workers who carve, sand, and finish instruments on the factory floor). Many of the electric guitar’s resource supply routes were well established before the instrument’s invention and mass production. The mold was earlier cast by preindustrial instrument makers (especially in European centers such as Cádiz, Grenada, Venice, Vienna, and Cremona) and further intensified by migrant entrepreneurs, who industrialized acoustic instrument production in North America from the 1850s through to the 1920s. European conifers from the central Alps were expensive to import into North America and insufficient to satisfy expanded industrial capacity, so makers shifted instead to supplies from Canada, the Appalachians, Adirondacks, and northern Michigan. Maples thus might arrive from Quebec; spruces (Picea spp.) from West Virginia and later, British Columbia and Alaska.

International routes also preceded the advent of the electric guitar: mahoganies arrived from Mexico, Cuba, and Honduras; ebony from equatorial Africa; rosewood from Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Acoustic guitar production amplified from the 1890s to 1920s—the very same period in which colonial expansion, enormous population growth, urbanization, and industrialization in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Asia triggered widespread land clearing and logging. Forest exploitation, imperialism, and industrial-capitalist trade went hand in hand, dispossessing resident Indigenous peoples of land while generating new export resource industries in agriculture and timber. Unprecedented volumes of “exotic” woods were unleashed into the global trade. All of this was made feasible by the invention of the steamship and expansion of a more efficient, longer-distance oceanic trade, linking South American and Asian ports with rapidly growing port cities in North America and Europe.⁵ Tropical hardwood specialists supplying guitar factories burgeoned along New York’s busy waterfront: F.A. Mulgrew on Eighth Street, East River; J.H. Monteath on East Sixth Street; C.H. Pearson & Son at the foot of Twenty-First Street, Brooklyn. The system of timber trading had expanded and consolidated so much by the 1930s that Monteath alone could offer more than a hundred different timbers from all corners of the earth: rosewood from Brazil; mahogany from Honduras; padouk (Pterocarpus soyauxii) from the Congo; alamiqui (Solenodon cubanus) from Cuba; degame (Calycophyllum candidissimum) from Guiana. By the 1920s, the pattern of timber trade was well established, linking the woods made into guitars with a suite of ecological, political, economic, and cultural upheavals, such as the clearing of the Mata Atlântica (Atlantic Forest) in Brazil; colonial dispossession in Latin America and the Pacific Northwest; and poor labor conditions in Africa and Indonesia. Unlike today’s guitar industry wood experts, who must go to India or Guatemala to inspect suppliers and verify sources for Fender or Gibson, representatives from earlier manufacturers could simply drop by the New York docks and select the best tropical hardwoods on offer. They almost certainly would not have known how the timber was sourced, exactly where it came from, or with what effect.⁶

As electric guitars proliferated in the postwar period, their designs combined elements from earlier instrument manufacturers with new materials. Gibson’s iconic Les Paul, ES-335, and SG styles displayed echoes of the company’s earlier specialties in acoustic, archtop, and mandolin manufacture: carved maple tops, for example, on the Les Paul; and set-neck designs making the most of the structural qualities of mahogany. When Leo Fender morphed early lap steel and electric prototypes into the Telecaster and subsequent models, he preferred—at least initially—to locate cheap woods for interchangeable, bolt-on parts. Mike Born, Fender’s head of wood technologies when we interviewed him in 2019, explained:

Nevertheless, concerns grew around deforestation, linked to colonization, agricultural expansion, urbanization, and industrialization. For the guitar industry, early signals of rosewood scarcity emerged in the mid 1960s with the rise of mass manufacturing. Production escalated to levels greater than the overall stock of replenishable timbers. As baby boomers purchased the same guitars played by their rock and folk heroes, guitar factories began to look for viable alternative timbers. Following Martin Guitars’s lead, electric guitar manufacturers switched supply from Brazil to the more readily available Indian rosewood (Dalbergia latifolia).

Growing public awareness of animal extinctions and the importance of biodiversity conservation, coupled with growing multilateral cooperation after the Second World War, fueled new forms of international regulation. In the 1960s, discussions began around restricting trade in endangered species as outrage grew over trades in furs, elephant ivory, rhinoceros horn, and shark fins. A 1963 World Conservation Union resolution led to the establishment of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in July 1975. In time, CITES would include more than 35,000 animal and plant species. Individual species are listed on Appendices 1, 2, or 3 of the Convention, depending on the degree of threat to their survival. Appendix 3 listings are effectively alarm bells rung by national jurisdictions seeking international assistance to limit commercial trade, thus signaling possible future threats and impending elevation to Appendix 2 status. Appendix 2 contains the majority of listed species, with accompanying controversies over what have become known as “non-detriment cases”: whether seized specimens were extracted in a manner detrimental to the survival of the species. Appendix 1, reserved for species at most threat of extinction, effectively bans international trade in them.

Several guitar timber species are now CITES-listed. The vanguard was Brazilian rosewood (Dalbergia nigra). Concerns over deforestation escalated with rapid urbanization and national developmental projects following the opening of the Trans-Amazonian Highway in 1972. Agricultural clearing, urban development, and forestry were accompanied by rising conservation awareness and science. Brazil’s government introduced the first threatened plant species lists and tightened regulation of timber exports. Converging with international momentum around CITES, in 1992, Dalbergia nigra was the first tree species listed on CITES Appendix 1. Brazilian rosewood, used ubiquitously for fretboards, backs, and sides, had in effect become an illicit commodity, akin to ivory. Listings of other timbers followed. Big-leaf mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) was listed in Appendix 3 first by Costa Rica (1995), then by Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru (1998–2001). Elevation to Appendix 2—a first for a high-volume timber species—followed in 2002. In January 2017, all other Dalbergia species, including Indian rosewood (D. frutescens) and cocobolo (D. retusa) plus bubinga (Guibourtia spp.), were listed in Appendix 2.

CITES is a system into which nation-states enter voluntarily. There are currently more than 180 signatory countries. It does not, however, replace national laws. Each nation-state must adopt its own legislation and fund agencies to ensure enforcement. In the US, the Lacey Act—legislation originally stewarded by Congressman John Lacey in 1900 to stop poaching and preserve wild game—was overhauled in 2008. Its scope was broadened from a primary focus on animals to include plants, timber, and wood products, tightening global efforts to curb illegal logging and aligning the United States with CITES. In a world first, the updated Lacey Act criminalized imports of timber that failed to comply with laws of another country.

Controversies over links between guitar making, forest destruction, and illicit sourcing of timber all culminated in the raids on Gibson Guitar factories in Nashville and Memphis in 2009 (and again in 2011). Newly empowered by the amended Lacey Act, on November 17, 2009, US Fish and Wildlife marshals moved through the Nashville plant, seizing raw materials, parts, and partially and fully finished guitars. Gibson, they would allege, had not acted with due care to ensure timbers complied with Madagascar’s national regulations, thus contravening CITES and the Lacey Act. News of the raid spread like wildfire. Panic set in among guitar industry executives, factory managers, and guitar players. Gibson issued press releases denouncing the raids. Nervous timber suppliers and guitar manufacturers scrambled for legal clarity. The regulatory environment spurred by CITES and the Lacey Act applied universally and retrospectively. Then in 2011, Gibson’s Nashville facility and its Memphis factory (where ES-335s were at the time produced) were again raided, this time over poor tracing and verification of rosewood from India. Gibson had become, in its own view, “embroiled in nothing less than a federally orchestrated witch hunt.”⁸ The government was accused of regulatory overreach, subjecting American businesses and workers to foreign laws. Energized by Fox News coverage, the Tea Party rallied behind Gibson, along with the National Association of Music Merchants. Meanwhile, environmental groups backed the government’s stricter stance. Reports from the European Union and nongovernment agencies documented the widespread trade in illegally logged timbers. Online guitar forum Reverb launched an awareness-raising campaign in support of the Lacey Act, pushing for an end to the trade in “blood-wood.” The matter was eventually settled out of court. But the larger message was now clear: historical overexploitation of forests by humans had finally caught up with contemporary manufacturing industries, which rely on the global trade in timber. And the industry with the “largest target on its back,” in the words of one wood supplier we interviewed, was guitar making.

Sustainability Initiatives

As historical sources of timber dry up and more complex international laws govern and protect threatened species, guitar makers have sought more sustainable alternatives and rethought designs that cherish (or at least tolerate) imperfections and timber’s infinitely variable character. Guitar manufacturers responded to the Gibson Guitar raids with various attempts to improve transparency and sustainability in resource procurement—so much so that details of the geographic origins of woods included in guitar manufacture have now become marketable, especially where there is the potential for “virtue signaling” their sustainability credentials.

Procurement documentation has taken on added significance. CITES addresses multiple actors—landowners, cutters, mills, traders, manufacturers, and retailers. CITES compliance depends upon the integrity and resourcing of individual countries’ biodiversity protection laws and enforcement agencies. That varies enormously. In the United States, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and the EU, resource management and customs institutions are generally strong. Countries with poorer regulation, limited funding, or political instability have less-than-ideal forestry monitoring and verification practices. That, in part, explained the Gibson raids, caused by concerns around illegal logging and untrustworthy government regulation in Madagascar, at the time midway through a volatile political coup.

Nowadays, eliminating supply chains with questionable legality is a priority; hence for rosewood fingerboards, Indian sources now dominate. According to Mike Born, rosewood buying in India remains the most reliable because it has “been around for a hundred years. The government controls all sales, at a straight auction … You can’t have something in your sawmill that you didn’t buy from the government.” The rosewood used for Fender fretboards “comes from standing dead trees that are harvested … The government keeps a tight rein on it. From the auction house to your sawmill, there’s a series of checkpoints that the truck travels through, and all documents must be signed off. There might be ten or twelve checkpoints. It’s quite a process.” “When it’s coming off the sawmill,” Born elaborated, “there’s a guy right there writing what log number it is, just in case. We know exactly where it came from.” A number is spray-painted on the end of each log, linking it to all the necessary information on its harvest history (the main source regions being Karnataka and Kerala states in India’s tropical southwest). Keen musicians can now find that number on their finished Fender in a tiny square recess cut into the neck block, among the quality-control stickers and stamps for the date and the worker responsible for making it.

Ongoing problems with supply chain legality, transparency, and intermittency have driven manufacturers to innovate with alternatives and substitutes. Wood species are not directly fungible, but approximations are possible. More plentiful woods are a responsible choice, especially concerning guitars made and marketed at lower prices—for example, acacias are used in many Chinese-made budget guitars. In a clear sign that alternatives to the “traditional” woods are necessary, in 2019, Fender shifted away from rosewood, replacing it with pau-ferro (Libidibia ferrea) on Mexican-made Stratocasters. Opinions among players are divided over the qualities of synthetic micarta, Richlite and Rocklite, as substitutes for ebony fingerboards. Given that a certain proportion of manufacturers and players have embraced them suggests that such materials have a market.

Another strategy has been to diversify sources and materials. Rather than rely upon single species harvested in unsustainable quantities from a limited number of sources, manufacturers spread the impact across suppliers, geographic places, materials, and species. The growing inconsistency of resource supply is, in this regard, both a problem and an asset for the guitar industry. Suitable timber dribbles in or comes in fits and flushes. That enables manufacturers to market limited editions and enables tonewood suppliers to favor one firm over another, depending on price and their sense that the timber will be responsibly used.

Another trend is to revive more plentiful local timbers. At Fender, Mike Born emphasized that “musical instruments were always developed from local woods,” citing the example of Stradivarius violins. “Some of us feel it would be nice to go back to that. What’s useable in our own backyard that we could design guitars around?” Summarizing future possibilities, Born sees “more recycled woods, reclaimed woods, and what I would call urban forestry. Less raw material coming out of the jungle. To expand our palate, you’ll see more limited runs, whether from redwood trees grown in Los Angeles or sinker logs pulled out of the bay.”

Companies have forged ahead with more sustainable local species, eliminating reliance on global supply chains, and the political and environmental complications (and accusations) that come with them. Australian guitar maker Maton, renowned for their native-timbered acoustic guitars used by Tommy Emmanuel, Keith Urban, and John Butler, have made a line of electric guitars using local woods, including Queensland maple (Flindersia brayleyana) for necks, Tasmanian blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon) for carved tops, and silver silkwood (Flindersia acuminata) and quandong (Eleaocarpus grandis) for bodies. The latter is harvested by Kirby Fine Timbers in Southeast Queensland from plantations on private land, originally established a century ago by forward-thinking landowners, and now maintained and replenished by Kirby for future use with a low-impact, selected harvest model. Single mature trees are felled in small numbers each year, well below the threshold at which the mixed-species forest continues to germinate seeds and regenerate itself.

Some plentiful alternatives also have their own cache and history, linked to twentieth-century experiments and budget models: Fender’s original prototype instruments were made from pine (Pinus spp.), which they reintroduced in 2017 as a limited edition. Tapping the trend for sustainable and salvaged timbers with interesting stories of provenance, the guitar was advertised as having come “full circle. This body wood began its functional life over 100 years ago as part of the Buckstaff Furniture Company’s facility in Oshkosh, WI before it was reclaimed, cooked and fashioned into an instrument. The grain, knotholes and man-made imperfections make each one unique.”⁹

Reclaimed and recycled woods are now much more common, sourced from everything from discarded piano soundboards to the rafters of Brooklyn buildings. Salvage specialists access sinker logs from wharves, fallen trees from forests and farms, and street and park trees that are now old or dangerous, due to be cut down by municipal councils, and that would otherwise be chipped for mulch or compost. Salvaging timbers is not without its own ecological impact. Fallen trees in forest environments, for example, provide important nutrients for fungi and seedlings (as they rot, they become so-called nurse logs); dead trees on farms and in forests are important habitats for birds, bats, possums, and other fauna. Nevertheless, salvaged timbers contribute to more diverse (and thus more resilient) supply chains and are popular among musicians, who appreciate the “story” that accompanies their instrument’s component materials.

Guitar industry figures are also taking matters into their own hands, planting trees in diverse places—on their own properties, on others’ private land, in partnership with manufacturing companies, cattle ranches, and Indigenous-owned and managed lands—so that wood for future use in guitar making may be available beyond their own lifetimes.¹⁰ Hawaiian koa, used in both acoustic and electric guitars, was overexploited by colonizing American interests in the late 1800s and early 1900s—the very same era in which the Brazilian, Indonesian, Pacific Northwest, Indian, and African forests were plundered by outsiders. While it was popular on interwar-era ukuleles and “Hawaiian” model acoustic guitars (notably Martins), koa’s use in instrument making had by the 1980s practically disappeared due to resource shortages. Yet plantations and resource recovery strategies have made koa feasible again in modest quantities, largely due to the efforts of guitar tonewood companies forging partnerships with landowners, guitar manufacturers, and Hawaiian interests. At Haleakala, on Maui, Paniolo Tonewoods was formed as a partnership between a ranching family business, Taylor Guitars, and specialist timber supplier Pacific Rim Tonewoods, to access plantations dating from the 1980s on private land. As that new venture matured, Paniolo Tonewoods developed relationships with Kamehameha Schools (a Hawaiian educational trust operating since 1887 via an endowment from Hawaiian princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, and now Hawaii’s largest private landowner). On 500 hectares of Kamehameha land at Hōnaunau, limited quantities of degraded koa are being salvaged in return for conservation services. Bob Taylor also purchased 230 hectares of pasture outside Waimea, at the ideal elevation to grow koa. Paniolo Tonewoods will lease this, planting koa and other native species over the next several years.

Among guitar manufacturers and timber suppliers is a growing consensus that industrial forestry, fixed on cheap, fast-growing species for the construction and furniture industries, is unlikely to meet their needs. Thus, guitar industry figures must act now to secure resource supplies for future generations. Mike Born said, “We don’t have a lot of choice in what was planted 60, 70 years ago but you certainly do going forward … we’re at that point [where] we need to have that maturing of how you look at the future. There’s certainly a taste for it out there.”

While clearing for urbanization is often to blame for the annihilation of old-growth habitats, most notably Brazilian rosewood, cities may prove vital future habitats for guitar trees. Fender announced a new initiative with the US Forest Service and the Baseball Hall of Fame to encourage tree replanting schemes in inner cities. Baseball bats are made from American ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica), as are Telecasters. Yet a notorious pest, the emerald ash borer, has in recent years annihilated ash trees across the continent, surviving warmer winters due to climate change, their populations exploding. The two niche industries—guitars and baseball bats—share the same problem of securing future resource supply. Fender’s idea is not for monocultural plantations of ash but replanting a variety of urban street trees, including ash, to disperse the genetic and geographic base of vulnerable species. “We have a chance now,” Born explained, “to replant old street trees. This time we could think a century down the road. Instead of planting a palm tree which has no real use, are there trees that at the end of their lifecycles can have a future life? It’s a worldwide discussion to have: what should we be planting for the future?” A pilot project has begun in Detroit with unemployed people working in nurseries. Ash borer-resistant strains of the tree have been identified in Michigan, so in Detroit, ash is being replanted as urban street trees when older ones die. “I love that thinking about centuries ahead,” says Mike. “Well, they’re trees. Let’s hope somewhere down the line somebody can see the effects of what we do.”

Many such innovations have been forced upon the industry because of legal compliance problems but also due to upstream scarcity issues and other environmental problems, notably climate change. Higher temperatures, more erratic rainfall, extreme storms, and extended droughts all challenge forests, foresters, and guitar timber supply chains. For an industry already rocked by illegal logging scandals and coping with profound changes to resource availability, there is further disruption ahead. Increased rates of species extinction and greenhouse gas emissions continue to draw the attention of climate scientists as key markers of the frightening epoch called the Anthropocene that we are said to have entered. With it come predictions of extensive volatility in social, economic, and geopolitical affairs. Without mitigation of climate change, temperatures could rise by an average of 3.6–4.5° Celsius; the Amazon could lose 69 percent of its plant species, and 60 percent of all species would be at risk in Madagascar.¹¹ Exactly how warming, drought, and more highly variable precipitation will proceed and impact on trees and forests remains essentially unknown. How trees will respond to higher temperatures and erratic rainfall, and how whole ecosystems and species assemblages will be reconfigured, is uncertain. Mountain and coastal forests are especially at risk. Less predictable fogs on the slopes of Hawaiian volcanoes threaten koa forests. In western Canada and the United States, trees are already dying in their millions from mountain pine beetle and other infestations brought about by higher temperatures that stress trees, and from warmer winters that fail to keep pathogens in check. Complicating matters is that in settler-colonial countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, selective burning, once a feature of Indigenous land management, has been curtailed, enabling dangerous undergrowth to accumulate, and further fueling insect population explosions.

As manufacturers and timber suppliers respond and adapt to future challenges, electric guitars will involve more frequent use of human-made composites and carbon fibers but also less homogeneity in their woods, more diverse species, greater use of plentiful local timbers, and smaller productions runs.

Musicians’ Ecological Entanglements

While responsibility for improving upstream ecological impacts rests with guitar makers and materials suppliers, players must also acknowledge their role. The instrument in your hand is more than a utilitarian object. It is an achievement of human engineering and craft knowledge, assembling materials from around the world, and binding each of us as musicians to dispersed ecological origins. Its maple cap, rosewood fretboard, or koa body are physical remnants of distant forests that have grown for decades or even centuries, brought together with human ingenuity and skill inside factories and workshops. Whether aware of it or not, guitarists are entangled with material resource extraction and use. Corporeal engagements with timber in the moments of music making—fingers on fretboards, bodies sensing the “feel” of the instrument—are simultaneously dialogic acts with workers and trees. A wider geography of material relating spans continents and a host of intermediary actors, places, and technologies. With that is the challenging realization that our musical preferences and playing choices are bound up in histories of colonial violence and capitalist exploitation of nature.¹²

Most guitar players—and just about all the guitar makers and timber experts we encountered in our research—hold a degree of commitment to environmental values. Musicians, in general, lean to the left politically, so it is no surprise that guitar makers are increasingly touting their sustainability credentials in marketing guitars. No consumer surveys exist on the extent to which the sustainability record of manufacturers is driving musicians’ purchasing decisions, but both our experience talking to guitar players around the world and the industry’s insider accounts suggest that age, income, gender, voting preferences, and nationality are important. Interviewing guitar players at an elite guitar festival in North America, greater emphasis was placed on acoustic qualities (“sweet mid-range and punchy bottom end”), rare examples of fine woods, and luthier skill, than on sustainability impact or procurement integrity. Nevertheless, when prompted to consider ecological impacts, players were keen to ensure that makers were “doing the right thing.” Chris Cosgrove at Taylor said that “Guitars have become more personal. People are more interested in what’s in a guitar, where it’s come from. Have you done everything properly?” The guitar festival crowd is, nevertheless, generally wealthier, male, and older than the average demographic purchasing lower-priced mass-manufactured guitars from retail shops, which is more likely to be aged fifteen to thirty-five, female, and getting by on lower incomes while studying or entering careers for the first time.¹³ Despite limited incomes compared with older players, younger musicians appear more likely to pay attention to sustainability record—consistent with research on attitudes to climate change and environmental issues more broadly.¹⁴ Highly attuned to social media discourse, they are also more likely to spot “bullshit greenwashing” in the advertising of guitar manufacturers, in the words of one teenage female player we encountered in a guitar shop in Sydney, Australia. According to Mike Born, “Younger, millennial players are much more conscious about what their guitars are made out of than the older, more traditional players.”

There is, however, no way around the central issue affecting the guitar industry, and all industries reliant on timber: continued forest loss. As populations continue to rise and rates of per capita resource consumption escalate, forests continue to be cleared for timber, fuel, farmland, and urbanization. While the quantity of materials used in guitar making is dwarfed by those in the furniture, paper, pulp, and construction industries (not even accounting for 1 percent of global trade),¹⁵ scarcities affecting timber production and consumption globally inescapably impact musical instrument manufacture, too.

The wider variety of timbers used in electric guitars nowadays—from diverse and more plentiful species and recycled and salvaged sources—indicates that the instrument’s future sustainability will steer away from standardized designs and singular material sources, especially as machining techniques and baseline quality improve. “It’s really that simple,” said Born, “You can make guitars out of almost anything.”

Yet credibility with tonewoods is critical. Harvey Molotch described how consumer goods, over time, tend toward a “type form”: a standardized design for the object in question, expected by consumers even if technically superseded.¹⁶ Hence, the basic design and layout of cars have barely changed since the 1920s; computers and cellular devices use the QWERTY keyboard inherited from typewriters; Levi jeans continue to be made from a 1950s template using cotton denim with a signature red tab. The electric guitar is no different. While designs are perhaps less rigid than for acoustic guitars—where spruce tops and rosewood bridges are entrenched—many models and their component timbers are nonetheless encased in “tradition”: Fender Telecaster bodies made from swamp ash, Gibson Guitar bodies from mahogany with figured maple tops. Disdain toward purported lower-quality woods and the consumer adherence to “tradition” remain problems for advocates of sustainability reform. As one older, male, but otherwise very environmentally conscious, left-wing voting guitar player put plainly to us while sharing the stage at a local gig, “I will always play Telecasters with rosewood necks; I just can’t stand maple. It’s too bright, and I don’t like its feel under my fingers.”

More plentiful woods suffer because they have featured on budget guitars, even if their acoustic and engineering properties are suitable. Basswood, for example, is a staple in Japan (used in traditional stringed-instrument making) but has been stigmatized as “cheap” in America—even though featuring on early FujiGen Fender models that are now collectibles. While pine was used in Leo Fender’s original prototypes, and featured on recent Telecaster reissues, it remains essentially out of vogue, associated with cheap construction lumber. Many players remain resistant to guitars made from plain maple pieces, even though their acoustic performance is almost invariably better than those with highly flamed or bird’s-eye figure (due to consistent linear grain).

As the ecological controversies surrounding guitar making persist, the designs cannot be made to traditional recipes forever. Rosewoods and ebonies are scarcer and risky for manufacturers. Patrick Evans at Maton Guitars believes

Guitar players cherish their instruments, hoping their guitars will last for lifetimes and become heirlooms. But to value the instrument properly, consumers must understand the true value of input materials. Ed Dicks, a guitar wood supplier in Port Alberni, British Columbia, put it aptly:

A stubborn contradiction defines the link between guitars and deforestation: no matter what efforts manufacturers undertake to educate consumers and improve upstream resource stewardship, as profit-seeking companies they benefit from guitarists’ desire to accumulate guitars. A well-known meme among musicians is that the very best guitar in the world is the next one you plan to buy. So much is the affliction to overconsume ubiquitous that the phrase “GAS” (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) has gone from being an in-joke among players to a source of academic inquiry.¹⁷ Yet, endless consumption considering dwindling forests is not feasible. To do right by the planet, manufacturers should reduce production and consumers should buy fewer guitars—following the “reduce, reuse, recycle” adage. But that would fundamentally challenge the industry’s need for continual growth.

At this point, the conversation shifts to responsible use of the materials already extracted for guitar making. Several guitar makers and timber suppliers complained about pointless perfectionism among certain markets. Elite North American and European customers, as well as those from China and Japan, were considered “very traditional” and expect “perfect” guitars with impeccably parallel grains—unrealistic expectations in an era of scarcity. While such views might overgeneralize diverse attitudes among players, it certainly rang true at guitar festivals we attended in North America and Australia, where comparatively wealthy musicians sought high standards and revered the use of exemplar woods on their instruments. According to Maton’s Patrick Evans,

Also important are second-hand instruments and maintaining the structural integrity and playability of guitars that are already in the world. Expensive guitars that are well made and great to play are very likely to be cherished, maintained, and passed down to future generations; material stewardship is practically baked into them. Purchasers of high-end electric guitars expect them to be well made and long-lasting—an important cultural ecological value in a world of disposability. The same cannot be said for the millions of budget instruments made every year. While there is consensus in the industry around responsible resource stewardship, at the rock-bottom end of the market, price-squeezing drives a “race to the bottom” for cheap forest products and the exploitation of labor. A guitar or ukulele with a unit price of $34 is almost guaranteed to be unplayable and to have come from factories with poor working conditions, using timber sourced at very low cost through ruthless negotiations with suppliers. Guitar tonewood supplier David Kirby posed a poignant question about the flood of lower-quality wood and guitars: “Are we ruining our own market by producing too many guitars?” Although automation has made guitars cheaper and amplified proliferation, standards have improved, especially in Asia, where the bulk of cheap guitars are now made. The advent of CNC and Plek machines (which carve out necks and perform minuscule operations to finalize setup) means that a greater proportion of affordable guitars nowadays are more precise and playable. That, in turn, means that they may, too, circulate longer as useable objects, escaping the category of junk.

Conclusion

Environmental impacts are inevitable when humans make and consume things. Musical instruments are no different.¹⁸ The world could stop making electric guitars tomorrow, and it would mitigate upstream ecological impacts. But use of timber by guitar companies is tiny compared with furniture making or building construction—the larger drivers of forest loss. No longer making guitars would also deny the masses opportunities to buy and play guitars. Music is a global language, vital to cultural diversity, and the guitar has been a force for expression and emotion around the world, becoming a symbol of youth, empowerment, and countercultural resistance. For these reasons, the world needs guitars and will need mass manufacture. That also means producing guitars from physical materials, and those materials must come from somewhere. No matter how humans “manage” nature, there are compromises and contradictions. Adjustments and alternatives may seem disappointing or unwelcome now but will likely seem necessary in the long run. After all, musicians no longer insist on real tortoiseshell pickguards or ivory saddles. That musicians cherish their instruments, participate in active communities of practice, and are fans of certain makers and models, are sources of cautious optimism. The wood in your guitar is possibly from a tree that stood in a forest before the continent of North America was colonized by Europeans. Knowing this may further inspire musicians to buy carefully and value the instrument accordingly.

Introduction

Electricity has served the guitar in a number of ways. The invention of the electric guitar was a catalyst for the birth of new genres of music that would not have been possible without electricity. Electricity has also enabled more advanced modes of guitar construction, influencing the instrument’s design. Progress in recording and communication technologies during the twentieth century also influenced the practice of guitarists. Historically, groups of people who share a common interest in the guitar have gathered together to share their music, knowledge, and ideas in local communities. However, the invention of the internet allowed for communication between guitarists, as well as other stakeholders in the worldwide guitar industry, such as retailers, guitar builders, and designers, to become much more rapid, more frequent, and more global. Twenty-first-century telecommunications advanced the notion of what a community is¹ and catalyzed the development of online guitar communities; groups of people sharing a common interest in the guitar that meet via the internet.

Electricity has, thereby, freed guitar communities from geographical boundaries. Online communities typically include people from diverse locations that would otherwise not interact. In a study on guitar in higher education, a guitar tutor observed the following: “There’s this sort of an underground community that [may be] forum based. Online communities that are not necessarily taking the place, but extending the usual social networks.”² In actuality, there are many virtual guitar communities as well as an overarching metacommunity that unites them. This chapter will present an auto-ethnographic immersive account of local, glocal, and global virtual guitar communities. It will explore the development of these communities, their activities, and their function. The discussion will address long-term cultural consequences of online communities, including the potential dominance of Western musics, along with the simultaneous paradox of the increased potential global exposure of lesser-known microcultures where the electric guitar is increasingly being adopted.

Pre-Internet Communities

For as long as guitar-like instruments have existed, they have been integral to the communities and cultures surrounding them. The broader, global music industry is often subdivided into various sub-sectors, including by genres or eras, or by communities or scenes. The notion of music scenes typically involves a location, albeit either geographical or virtual. Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson define music scenes as “clusters of producers, musicians and fans [who] collectively share their common musical tastes and collectively distinguish themselves from others.”³ However, they do not clearly define what a “cluster” is and acknowledge they can be local, trans-local, or virtual. This chapter will focus on the concept of communities as described by Etienne Wenger’s⁴ definition of Communities of Practice: “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”⁵ The defining difference between Wenger’s communities, when compared with Bennett and Peterson’s scenes, is the sense of purpose and passion behind learning how to do things better as members symbiotically interact, whereas scenes have a more commercial tendency.

What is generally considered to be the “modern” form of the classical and flamenco guitar was developed in nineteenth-century Spanish workshops. Subsequently, Spanish culture and the guitar have become inseparable and symbiotic. Within the numerous towns and villages in the Andalusian region, the guitar makers’ home workshops were the hub of local communities. Carrying their culture, Spanish explorers and pioneer settlers took the guitar with them to various locations around the world, birthing new local guitar-centered cultures. Thus, the guitar then became a popular instrument in the Americas in the early twentieth century, where the electric guitar was invented and developed.

With technological progress in the twentieth century, including faster and cheaper international travel and communication, the guitar further developed its global instrument status: “The instrument has gained a central place in, and has helped to define, musical genres worldwide.”⁶ As the twentieth century advanced, various guitar-centered subcultures evolved in numerous locations on every inhabited continent. These subcultures typically focused on genre but also included quite varied foci such as artists buying, selling, and collecting guitars, building and modifying guitars, and learning to play the guitar. With the help of electricity and the invention and growing popularity of the electric guitar, this phenomenon has developed exponentially, with diverse subcultures and subgenres evolving simultaneously. This has happened most prominently within the United States of America, where the guitar has played a prominent role in the birth and development of blues, jazz, country, rock and roll, and all the associated subgenres and genre fusions.

For example, the raw palette and accompanying timbres of southern blues have a distinctly different flavor to other American guitar-centered genres, including urban funk, Seattle grunge, or Tennessean rockabilly, to name just a few. However, there is something much more profound than what a disassociated listener could hear from recordings. There is an accompanying culture deeply integrated with each genre. The culture involves the community of music makers and music consumers, and influences lifestyle choices as diverse as clothing, hairstyles, lingo, food and alcohol consumption, and even the choice of car they drive. These are all indicators of community.

The genres of music dominated by the electric guitar were generated, and evolved, through a blend of self-pedagogy from recordings, magazines, books, and oral traditions in communities. Jeff Schwartz, a musician and scholar from Los Angeles, describes this process by reflecting on his own journey:

This function of guitar communities fits Wenger’s definition of a community of practice. Since the inception of the electric guitar, communities similar to the one described by Schwartz have existed across the globe where guitarists have gathered to share and compare knowledge and spur each other on. With developments in communication technologies, particularly since the birth of the internet, these communities have gravitated toward virtual spaces. Furthermore, new communities, and new types of communities, have evolved, existing only in the virtual world.

Virtual Guitar Communities

Online communities of guitarists exist primarily to serve the same fundamental function as geolocated communities, that is, to share knowledge and resources, and to encourage each other (often via competitive banter). The earliest of these communities were internet forums, newsgroups, and chat rooms. Howard Rheingold described his involvement in an early online conferencing system, WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), as an “authentic community” involved in the “self-design of a new kind of culture.”⁸

These services were soon followed by peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing websites where users could upload transcriptions of guitar performances. These could include riffs, solos, chord structures, and whole songs. There was little control, and little understanding, of global copyright legalities in the earliest communities. Napster, an early audio-streaming P2P service, encountered legal issues and was forced to cease operating after two years of high popularity. Most of the guitar-centered P2P websites focused on sharing files of tablature (tabs). Tablature is a form of written music that indicates the physical placement of notes on the instrument rather than indications of pitch and duration, as with standard notation. As a form of storing music for guitar, it existed for at least half a millennium before being appropriated and modified by the online guitar community. Various unwritten protocols evolved within the online community regarding the choice of font and role of particular symbols, etc. Users also generated a variety of modes of notating chord structures. However, there was little universality, which often caused confusion within the community. Figure 15.1 shows examples of how community members could generate content using simple word processor characters to indicate strumming patterns and chord voicings, and tablature.

Figure 15.1 Examples of online guitar community communication typeface

A problem with tablature is the lack of a universal mode of indicating note duration. Attempts have been made by members of the online community to overcome this. Figure 15.2 illustrates an example.

Figure 15.2 Online tablature with duration legend

One of the earliest P2P guitar websites was OLGA (the Online Guitar Archive), which began in June 1992.⁹ OLGA was an interactive site where users could share tablatures and lessons. It was founded by James Bender and originally hosted by the University of Nevada in Las Vegas,¹⁰ later morphing into Harmony Central. By the time it was shut down in 2006, it had hosted over 30,000 files of guitar tablature. There now exist tablature-sharing websites operating under licenses with publishers, artists, and agencies. The largest of these is Ultimate-Guitar.com (UG), which hosts over 1.1 million files and has over 10 million registered users. As well as a P2P file-sharing site, UG also hosts forums, lessons, and articles. They describe themselves as “easily the most badass and fastest growing guitarist community in the world that creates, learns and shares tabs.”¹¹

With the advent of social media, online communities became easier to engage with and subsequently grew in popularity. Today, online guitar communities exist in a wide range of virtual spaces, including Facebook, YouTube, X (formerly known as Twitter), Pinterest, LiveJournal, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. They also continue to exist in newsgroups and chatrooms, as well as informal email communities.

Prior to the World Wide Web, Usenet newsgroups were popular virtual spaces for a large assortment of various online communities, including guitar communities. In February 2001, Google acquired Deja News Research Service, an online archive of Usenet discussion group messages. This led to the development of Google Groups. There are currently nearly 5,000 guitar-related groups on Google Groups, with archived messages dating back to 1981. Guitar-related Google Groups include a diverse range of interests, including music theory, buying and selling guitars, learning to play, guitar repairs, and more esoteric interests such as guitar decals, guitar tools, and specific band fan discussion groups. Within the virtual space of Google Groups, there also exist geolocation specific groups, including, for example, “Guitarists of Louisville,” “NYC Guitarists,” and less specific groups, including “Guitarists USA.” Many guitar-related Google Groups now see very little activity, with some groups having no new posts for over ten years. This is largely due to the shift of virtual guitar communities to big-media social media sites, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and X. However, there are still a few active online message boards within the virtual guitar community. For example, a group hosted by FeedSpot that focuses on the Fender Stratocaster, Strat Talk Forum,¹² averages more than thirty posts per day, and The Gear Page, from the same hosts, which describe themselves as “the leading online community and marketplace for guitars, amps, pedals, effects and associated gear,”¹³ averages eighteen posts per day.

Facebook

Social media site Facebook began operations in 2004. Within the virtual space created by Facebook, there are now countless guitar-related communities. These groups defy categorization, as there seems to be an endless array of purposes and foci for them. There are groups with no specific focus, which cater to all things related to guitar, and other groups with a very narrow catchment, and everything in between. There are genre-specific groups, groups for fans of particular artists or manufacturers, groups for discussion of equipment, and groups specifically for trading gear.

Some of the guitar communities on Facebook are extremely large, having memberships in the hundreds of thousands. For example, “Top Guitar Players – Community,” which began in 2009, now has over 335,000 members and averages over 100 posts each day. Table 15.1 lists some of the other significant Facebook guitar communities, including their membership numbers and their descriptor.

Guitar communities also exist in virtual spaces for geolocated people groups. For example, there are Facebook groups for guitarists in particular nations, states, and counties, and groups focusing on individual cities. Table 15.2 lists a few geospecific Facebook guitar communities, further demonstrating the wide variety of communities that exist within the Facebook platform.

There are many guitar communities on Facebook specifically for manufacturers of guitars, or even specific models of guitars. Some of these communities are maintained by the manufacturing company; however, many are unofficial and maintained by fans. Table 15.3 lists some of these communities. It is safe to assume that the “official” sites are part of the brands’ marketing, as hosting communities helps develop and perpetuate brand allegiance. This is a testament to the value, and the potential, of online guitar communities.

Some examples of Facebook guitar communities with two defining criteria, one geographical and one manufacturer specific, are “Taylor Guitar Owners Group USA,” which has over 15,000 members, and “Telecaster Guitars Australia,” with just under 3,000 members. The group “Singapore Two-Handed Tapping (Touchstyle) Guitar,” a relatively small online community with 579 members, is a geospecific community focusing on an individual guitar playing technique. There are gender-specific guitar communities, including “Female Guitarists who Rock,” with 1,354 members, and “Female Guitar Players Worldwide,” with 817 members. The small sizes of these communities potentially suggests an observed gender bias¹⁴ that has historically permeated the guitar industry and may have potentially transferred to online spaces. YouTuber Guitar Goddess¹⁵ acknowledges there is still a presence of sexism and discrimination in both offline and online communities.

Among the multitude of guitar communities on Facebook, there are some very specific and obscure communities. Table 15.4 lists a few examples of the more bizarre and obscure.

Virtual guitar communities allow guitarists from all over the globe to interact in real time with other guitarists located anywhere and everywhere around the world. Activities typical of Facebook guitar communities include: asking for advice on equipment or for learning to play, uploading videos and recordings (often for feedback), showing off guitars, sharing links to other web pages, and sharing tablature or sheet music (often of transcriptions of guitar solos).

There is considerable overlap between communities in different host virtual spaces. For example, guitarists on Facebook groups often link content to YouTube channels. Demonstrating the presence of this cross-platforming within the online guitar community is the Facebook community entitled “YouTube Guitar Players Group,”¹⁶ with over 7,600 members and an average of over 1,000 posts each month. The group is administered by a member in Brazil, and their statement (translated from Portuguese) is as follows:

The vast majority of the material is amateur guitarists sharing homemade content in the form of videos of themselves performing on their guitars. Other popular content includes backing tracks and gear reviews. Members of this Facebook group can be found commenting on each other’s YouTube videos, demonstrating the kind of regular interaction expected in a community of practice as defined by Wenger. The interaction between these communities blurs the boundaries between them to the point that we should not really consider them boundaries at all but pathways. There exists a complex, seemingly almost infinite, series of conduits between communities, virtual hosts, and individual members.

YouTube

YouTube was launched in 2005 and purchased by Google in 2006. Within the virtual space created by YouTube, there are typically two main types of people: content creators (often labeled YouTubers) and content consumers. However, there is no precise distinction between these two, as most content creators are also consumers, and many consumers are also creators. There are also two types of content creators: some are using the space to purposefully generate income through royalties, referrals, advertising, and selling educational content; others, whose involvement is simply because they just want to share their content with a wider audience. Therefore, it is best to think of types of activity rather than types of user. Also, there is no clear distinction between activities of users regarding their role(s) in the virtual guitar community, as there is clear evidence of content creators participating in a community among other content creators, as well as acting as a community between themselves and their subscribers. Evidence also exists of a sense of community between subscribers of different guitar content YouTube creators; however, this is less manifest, as it occurs across different web pages and is not necessarily intended as a community activity.

On Sunday, March 21, 2021, a member of the Facebook community “Everything Guitar” posted the question: “What’s everyone’s favorite youtube guitarist?” Within the responses, 112 different guitarists were listed. Surprisingly the guitarists listed were not former mainstream performing or recording artists but were known only or primarily for their activity on YouTube. This supports Kevin Dawe’s¹⁷ assertion that the guitar is both a driver of, and subject to, rapid sociological change from its roots in cottage industries to its preeminence in cyberspace. Figure 15.3 shows the YouTubers with more than three votes.

Figure 15.3 Favorite YouTube guitarists – Everything Guitar Facebook community

On March 24, 2017, a member of another guitar-based group on Facebook, “Top Guitar Players – Community,” posted a similar question: “Who is your favorite YouTube Guitarist???” There were 117 different YouTube guitarists listed in the results. Figure 15.4 shows the guitarists with two or more votes.

Figure 15.4 Favorite YouTube guitarists – Top Guitar Players Facebook community

We can garner some ideas of the favorite YouTube guitarists among the virtual guitar community by combining the results. Table 15.5 shows the six YouTube guitarists found in the top ten of both lists, their total number of votes, and the number of subscribers to their YouTube channels.

Evidence of YouTube guitarists acting as a global interactive community of practice can be found in examples where they collaborate: Marty Schwartz’s channel includes interviews with Rick Beato, and Paul Davids’ channel features videos with input from fellow YouTuber guitarists Helen Ibe and Mary Spender. Tyler Larson’s channel features many videos with input from other YouTubers, including Paul Davids and Tomo Fujita, as well as other famous musicians, including Tommy Emmanuel and St. Vincent.

The Covid-19 pandemic acted as a catalyst for greater levels of online collaboration than had been occurring previously. Many YouTuber guitarists created videos with other members of the community during lockdown periods when live music was all but shut down around the globe. For example, Dutch YouTuber guitarist Paul Davids released a video¹⁸ of a collaborative production with ten other guitarists from Europe, the USA, and the UK. The video featured each collaborator overdubbing an improvised guitar solo over the same backing track. The collaborators each also featured various similar collaborative projects on their own YouTube channels, strengthening and broadening the sense of community. UK-based YouTuber guitarist Chris Buck stated he was enjoying the collaborative spirit that arose in response to the lockdowns.¹⁹ The sense of community has further strengthened ever since, with many YouTuber guitarists now traveling to collaborate in person.

A UK-based YouTube channel, JTC Guitar, developed a series of videos titled JTC collab series, which features videos of five different electric guitarists recording a lead solo over a pregenerated backing track. This series was launched in November 2019,²⁰ just before the Covid lockdowns. The nature of an online collaboration meant the restrictions did not impede this project, and it continued unabated throughout the pandemic. In 2020, French YouTuber Florian Merindol produced a playlist of videos he called Covid Guitar Battles. Each video featured a collaboration between himself and other guitarists trading riffs, licks, and lead solos. He stated, “Covid 19 give [sic] us time to have fun with our friends (only on internet!! Lol)!”²¹ and invited the community of watchers to leave comments on which performances they preferred.

Before the pandemic, YouTuber Jared Dines began a series of videos he called the biggest shred collab song in the world. The first video²² was released in December 2017 and featured twenty-three other YouTube guitarists. Affirming the communal atmosphere of the YouTube guitar community, he opened the first video with this monologue:

The subsequent collaborations in this series continued through the pandemic, with each video featuring over twenty YouTube guitarists and including links to each of their channels in the descriptions. The fifth video,²³ published in December 2022, featured seventy YouTube guitarists’ submissions, all mixed into a single musical montage lasting almost 37 minutes. These few examples demonstrate the collaborative spirit, passion, and regular interaction that exist between members of the online guitar community.

The videos produced by the members of the YouTube guitar community, both professional and amateur, are predominantly educational and instructional. Most of them focus on learning a particular song or musical concept. Other topics include advice on purchasing gear (including guitars, amplifiers, and effects pedals), how-to videos on guitar maintenance, historical perspectives on the guitar and its role in various musical genres, interviews with other guitarists and associated industry persons, and performances of guitar-based music. Some of the more obscure videos include discussion on who is the most overrated guitarist, tours of guitar stores, unboxing videos of guitar-related equipment, and discussion on why Taylor Swift is, or is not, the new Eddie Van Halen. Many of the activities are designed to invoke discussion and community activity, or are responses to or discussions about various happenings with the virtual guitar community.

An examination of the comments sections on various YouTube guitar videos confirms that there is a real sense of community. Many YouTubers maintain ongoing online conversations with their viewers, and viewers “chat” among each other in the comments sections. There is considerable overlap between YouTube channels, with many of the same viewers leaving comments on multiple guitar-themed YouTube channels. The sense of community is often explicitly acknowledged by the YouTuber guitarists. One sign of a healthy community is internal critique. This is also evident in the online guitar community, particularly on YouTube. In response to her video addressing the topic of sexism in the community,²⁴ guitarist and YouTuber using the pseudonym “Guitar Goddess” received unanimously positive remarks in the video’s comments section. YouTuber guitarist Stay Metal Ray ran a live stream video on YouTube discussing hate speech within the community, and he also received overwhelmingly positive responses, including: “I think this is a great video, man.”²⁵

The existence of a community, as per Wenger’s definition, existing across platforms is also evident. A particular example of this is YouTuber Dogshark’s investigation of the idea of purchasing a guitar made by the American manufacturer PRS (Paul Reed Smith). He decided the best way to learn about them was to join a Facebook group.²⁶ During his video discussing his experience, he refers to both the Facebook and YouTube communities saying, “I’m here to learn,” and describing other members as “kindred spirits” within the community. There are comments on his YouTube video from people in the Facebook community, and he finishes his video by saying, “I’d just like to thank the whole PRS community for helping me out there.” The cross-platform community spirit also exists between YouTube and Instagram, with many YouTuber guitarists posting videos critiquing each other’s Instagram guitar videos.

Instagram and X (formerly Twitter)

Instagram was launched in 2010. The Instagram platform favors short videos of less than 60 seconds in duration. As a result of this, guitar community videos on Instagram typically feature excerpts of performances and often more quirky content. Instagram also uses the same chat facility hosted by Facebook. The guitar community on Instagram includes many of the same people as on YouTube, with many YouTube content creators using Instagram to post news, updates, and messages to their fanbase and short versions or excerpts of their YouTube videos. Instagrammer and YouTuber Rick Beato typically starts his Instagram videos with the caption “Quick lesson,” followed by a short example of a single musical idea. These videos are often linked to longer explanations on his YouTube channel.

The nature of the Instagram platform does not allow for the same sense of community as Facebook and YouTube. However, the community is still evident and highly active. The community interaction is mostly via comments and “likes” on members’ posts. Well-known community members can be seen commenting on each other’s posts, and they attract similar lists of followers and comments.

Twitter began operation in 2006 and described itself as offering a “microblogging” service (rebranded as X in 2023). Posts on X are limited to 280 characters, and videos are limited to 2 minutes and 20 seconds in duration. In a similar fashion to the other platforms, the best-known guitar content creators have formed a community on Twitter/X by following each other and sharing countless common followers. A good example of interaction within the X guitar community can be seen in a post by a follower of four well-known content creators asking about guitar tablature for left-handed players. This was reposted and started a conversation that spread across the other users’ pages. A notable difference in activity in the guitar community on X compared to other platforms is that the content is typically more personal about the content creator’s daily life activities and what projects they are currently working on or developing.

A common theme among the Instagram and X guitar communities is that members use these platforms to create links to their YouTube channels. X and Instagram guitarists, who also maintain YouTube channels, typically have fewer followers on X and Instagram than subscribers on YouTube. Table 15.6 shows a comparison of a selection of popular content creators on all three platforms.

The most notable advantage of twenty-first-century communications having provided platforms for these communities to develop is the breakdown of geographical boundaries for membership of such communities. Guitarists from any location in the world can join a community of kindred spirits to share and learn instantaneously across the globe. It allows people who might never meet but share common, maybe quite esoteric interests, to collaborate. This has created enormous communities, as well as small communities across enormous distances, and challenges the traditional definition of community.

Cultural Consequences of Online Guitar Communities

There are numerous potential economic, aesthetic, and cultural consequences of the development of virtual guitar communities and the shift from geolocation to online spaces. Big record companies and labels now have less influence on the listening practices of today’s music consumers.²⁷ How people now access, store, and categorize music is different and constantly changing. The ability to personalize one’s own playlists and influence the algorithms delivering new music is rapidly evolving.²⁸

It is also now easier, and faster, than ever for an artist to produce quality music at home and disseminate it to the world. This process offers the potential to bypass the talent scouts and other middlemen of the previous music industry model. This has major repercussions for the economics and aesthetics of the entire music industry. It offers an end-user-driven meritocracy rather than one controlled by a few people in privileged industry positions. Communities of fans assemble virtually and in a kind of organic fashion around artists using their social media platforms as portals to the community.

There are also a number of possible cultural consequences of guitarists engaging with online guitar communities. None of these are inherently good or bad, but they do indicate a shift in the global music industry and aesthetics of music as a whole. One possibility is a loss (or reduction) of geolocated local cultural idiosyncratic expressions. As the current generation of guitarists engage and interact with guitarists in global communities, their aesthetic expressions may become homogenized. This has been observed to be occurring in many non-Western countries, causing concern for local governmental bodies who predict a loss of local cultural expression as their younger generations engage with global cultural identities. In many countries, this is being deliberately combated by an increase in local traditional content in music education programs.²⁹

The second possibility is greater exposure to previously unknown geospecific cultural expressions. For example, the vast majority of subscribers to Nigerian guitarist Helen Ibe’s YouTube channel are from outside Nigeria, and indeed outside Africa. Her listeners will be exposed to music they would not have otherwise encountered. This may, in turn, influence their own performance practices, either by deliberate imitation of Ibe’s aesthetics or via a form of subliminal osmosis simply by being exposed to her music. The online platforms have allowed for a much more rapid transfer of cultural content as well as a reciprocal symbiotic sharing between cultures that did not previously exist.

Just as guitar-based blues migrated up the Mississippi and then across the Atlantic to heavily influence the popular music of the late 1950s and early 1960s, there is a similar cultural migration occurring in the twenty-first century. However, this time the migration is eclectic and undefined, occurring across virtual spaces to then, in turn, influence numerous and various geolocated cultures. After the blues had influenced the British music scene, there was a cultural exchange with British pop, in turn influencing American popular music. This kind of circular influence is now happening on microscales simultaneously across the globe along countless pathways and locations.

This phenomenon leads to the third potential, which is the creation of entirely new blends of cultural expressions that would not have been possible without global telecommunications. It is now possible to virtually visit the musical culture of any place in the world in an instant, at almost no cost and without leaving your own home. Musicians actively seeking influence from other parts of the world have never had such freedom of opportunity. In fact, the opportunity is so free and easily accessible that it is now difficult to avoid. Musical influence from other cultures can seep into one’s newsfeed or social media stream without being actively sought. Musicians may then choose to deliberately explore these exotic musical styles in the interest of incorporating the aesthetics into their own performance styles. Online music distribution networks have allowed the “impossible to spread music” to spread, while also making music transfer more efficient and convenient as time and location are no longer a significant part of the equation.³⁰ Contact can easily be made, and instruction sought and found, from artists in previously unreachable geolocations. The potential cultural collaborations are seemingly endless. What effect this may have in the long term on a global cultural expression of the virtual guitar community as a whole is unpredictable. It is possible that a simultaneous paradox of homogeneity and heterogeneity may evolve. Just exactly what this will look like will be largely driven by the virtual guitar community itself as a single living and evolving entity with many sub-entities all contributing, probably often without their cognitive awareness of the part they are playing.

The transmission of cultural aesthetic influences and the tendency of Western “genrefication”³¹ is taking a toll on global music markets and potentially costing the music creators. The necessity to commodify genre in what is a capitalist global market intensifies during periods of flux.³² Dawe claims the guitar transcends culture, describing it as “an instrument of global performance”³³ that is capable of surviving global change. The guitar is a common denominator connecting musical styles and cultures, individuals, and communities, as well as social concerns, including politics and economics. The guitar as a phenomenon has not only survived but moved across changes in culture and time. This is clearly demonstrated, for example, by the existence of highly active Facebook communities for the Fender Telecaster,³⁴ an early solid body electric guitar still produced to this day with very little changes in design. These groups are truly global, with members from all around the world and content reflecting diverse cultural and genre expressions.

Another repercussion of the meritocracy that is afforded by the current global guitar virtual communities is the potential abolition, or disassembly, of previous industry biases. The public cast their votes with their numbers of downloads, views, and “likes.” Artists do not need the previous trappings typically enforced by the industry, including physical aesthetics, fashion, or some sort of “X factor,” for the public to connect via social media. Community members listen to the music they enjoy listening to and encounter new music via algorithms fed, at least in part, by their own personal choices. Furthermore, language barriers are not an issue, as listeners from other countries and cultures can still explore whatever music they seek. Another potential consequence is the breakdown of previous industry-led gender bias, allowing a greater percentage of female guitarists to gain a global fanbase. There is an increasing number of female YouTuber guitarists and female online guitar tutors in the community.³⁵

Conclusion

Electricity has served the guitar in a number of ways. One such way is by acting as a conduit for migration through the various communities existing in virtual spaces which link geolocated guitarists across the globe.

Throughout the history of the guitar’s existence, its players have formed collectives in the form of artist networks, with practitioners participating in ongoing interaction for the purposes of sharing their art, infotainment, support, critical feedback, idea development, and to foster a competitive environment. The domains for guitar communities have migrated from the traditional local music scenes, performance venues, guitar shops, schools, and jam sessions to new forms of virtual communities in online spaces through a series of networks virtually located on sites as diverse as Google Groups, Ultimate Guitar, and social media giants YouTube and Facebook. The long-term cultural aesthetic consequences of virtual guitar communities are yet to be fully realized, as this phenomenon is still in its infancy. They include a potential cultural homogenization comprising a single dominant culture. However, online communities also offer greater global exposure to hitherto unknown microcultures and previously inaccessible geolocated musical expressions where the electric guitar is now being ubiquitously adopted.

Commentators on the twenty-first-century popular music industry see a potential consequence of global telecommunications to be an increasing dominance of the Western cultural paradigm. Although Westernization and its accompanying musical expression through popular music are spreading through non-Western locales, we also see the opposite occurring. Communities of guitarists are no longer geospecific and cultural and aesthetic expressions, particularly in the form of guitar performance practices, are freely transmitted globally and instantaneously via virtual networks.