Introduction

The invention of the electric guitar is arguably the most important development in musical instruments during the last century. With the possible exception of the synthesizer, no other musical instrument can claim to have had the impact on twentieth-century music—and society—that the electric guitar and its variants have. The electric guitar’s origins have been the subject of much heated debate and the source of much mythology. In addition, there is a significant prehistory of the electric guitar that remains largely unknown or unacknowledged. The roots of the electric guitar run deep—as far back as the mid-eighteenth century—and its development must be understood within the larger context of musical and technological history. Despite this, it is now generally acknowledged that the first commercially successful electric guitar was the Electro “Frying Pan,” invented by George Beauchamp and manufactured in collaboration and corporate partnership with Adolph Rickenbacher¹ by the Ro-Pat-In Corporation (later known as Electro String Instrument Corporation and known today as Rickenbacker International Corporation). The technology that Beauchamp developed for the Frying Pan is the basis for the overwhelming majority of electric stringed instruments² that have followed. Although others had key roles, especially with regard to commercial aspects, Beauchamp’s work is the nexus and watershed event in the development of the electric guitar. However, George Beauchamp is the forgotten man in this story—most likely because he left the musical instrument business in 1940, a little more than ten years after entering it, and died within months of doing so. Unlike some of the other important figures of twentieth-century guitar manufacturing, Beauchamp did not live to see the immense expansion in popularity of the electric guitar during the 1950s and 1960s, and thus claim a more prominent place in the public’s consciousness.

What Makes an Electric Guitar an Electric Guitar?

In order to fully examine the history of the development of the electric guitar, it is necessary to define the term: what makes a guitar “electric”? The mere application of electricity to a musical instrument, such as the addition of a blower motor to a pipe organ, does not necessarily make an instrument “electric.” It is also generally agreed that simply amplifying the strings of a guitar does not make it an “electric guitar.” If this were so, an acoustic guitar amplified by a microphone could be considered an electric guitar. What defines almost all electric stringed instruments is the particular way that the vibrations of its strings are amplified: an electromagnetic pickup.³ This is the heart of an electric guitar’s circuitry. As its name suggests, a pickup “picks up” the vibration of a guitar string, which is then amplified. Physically, an electromagnetic pickup consists of a magnet, in the form of either a single bar or individual slugs for each string, or a combination of both, surrounded by a coil wrapped in copper wire. Vibration from ferrous strings creates electrical impulses in the pickup; these are then transferred from the instrument to an amplified loudspeaker. Although the physical configuration of this setup can vary slightly, almost all modern electric guitar pickups work on this principle. While other methods of electromagnetically amplifying strings were developed and commercially produced during this nascent period, none ultimately proved as successful as Beauchamp’s design.

The Prehistory of the Electric Guitar

The Context and Driving Forces Behind the Electric Guitar

All of the preceding instruments lack the one feature that, for most people today, would be the entire point of an electrical musical instrument: the ability to be louder than a nonelectric one. This change in the essential conception of electric musical instruments began around the turn of the twentieth century and, early on, was driven mostly by the invention and spread of telephone technology. In contrast to more modern times, during this nascent period, “amplified” was not synonymous with “louder.” Indeed, due to the low power of many early amplifiers, it could be questioned whether some of these early amplified instruments were even as loud as their fully acoustic counterparts.

The contention is typically made that in the quest for greater volume, the sound box of the guitar was gradually increased in size until it became physically impractical to play. Then, inventors turned to mechanical amplification to increase the volume of the instrument, before considering electrical amplification, which became the final and most widely used solution to this “problem.”¹¹ There are a number of factors that determine the volume of a stringed instrument—such as string material, construction, instrument tessitura, playing technique—and none of these can be considered in isolation. This is not to suggest, however, that increased volume was not a concern and the goal of electrical experimenters and manufacturers of the time; contemporary magazine articles mention both recent advancements in sound reproduction and the need/desire for ever greater sound clarity and volume in radios and phonograph players.¹² However, it is noteworthy that the same complaints are not made concerning stringed instruments. Although the banjo was one of the first stringed instruments to be amplified, previously no one seemed to be complaining that banjos could not be heard over other instruments. It is clear, then, that before the 1930s, the quest for greater volume in stringed instruments was driven by novelty and electrical experimentation (both of which can be considered a zeitgeist of the 1920s especially) rather than a perceived lack by musicians in the volume-producing capabilities of stringed instruments.

The “Mysterious Mr. Beauchamp”

Although now generally acknowledged as the inventor of the electric guitar, the name of George Beauchamp is not as well known as others important to the history of the American guitar, such as C.F. Martin, Leo Fender, or Orville Gibson. Even the “Frying Pan” electric guitar he designed is much more associated with the name of Adolph Rickenbacker, the man primarily responsible for its commercial manufacture, than with Beauchamp, its inventor. Add to this the fact that the two principal accounts of Beauchamp’s life, written more than forty-five years after his death, are primarily based on interviews marked by strong partisanship—both for and against Beauchamp³³—and it is easy to see why National String Instrument Corporation employee Al Frost once described him as “the mysterious Mr. Beauchamp.”³⁴

George Delmetia Beauchamp was born in Texas on March 18, 1899. In the Rickenbacker archives, there exists a short and somewhat ‘folksy’ account of Beauchamp’s life and inventions written by Adolph Rickenbacker around 1960, some twenty years after Beauchamp’s death. In his account, Rickenbacker says that Beauchamp told him, “his pappy gave him a mule and an old wagon and told him to ‘git,’ and that is about all he had with the exception of an old guitar.” Although it has usually been assumed that Beauchamp was a full-time professional musician during the mid 1920s, the Los Angeles city directories for both 1923 and 1926 listed his profession as a house painter.

The Emerging Electric Guitar Market of the 1930s

Introduction

Three guitars released within a three-year period from 1951 to 1954 signal something of a “golden age” in guitar historiography: the Fender Telecaster (1951), Gibson Les Paul (1952), and Fender Stratocaster (1954). As Matt Brounley explores in Chapter 5, these three guitars continue to provide a template for contemporary electric guitar designs up to the present day. Their influence has been all the more pronounced because their production coincided with a period of major transformation in US popular music that culminated in the emergence of rock ’n’ roll. Musical and technological innovation effectively intersected during these years and created the conditions for the electric guitar to emerge as the dominant musical instrument of the rock era. Consequently, these three guitars and their makers stand at the center of many accounts of the electric guitar’s evolution and impact, up to Ian Port’s valuable 2019 dual portrait of Leo Fender and Les Paul.¹

In this chapter, I want to take a longer and broader view of this golden age of electric guitar design, which in conventional terms runs from the advent of the earliest Fender solid body electrics in 1948/49 to the release of the most coveted Gibson Les Paul Sunburst models between 1958 and 1960. As essential as these foundational electric guitar models of the 1950s have become, their significance cannot be understood apart from the efforts to “electrify” the guitar that preceded them. I do not aim to retell the story of the electric guitar’s invention, covered so well in the preceding chapter by Matthew Hill. Instead, this chapter begins with the early 1930s moment when the electric guitar is already “invented,” for all intents and purposes, but when its impact was only starting to be felt. The 1936 release of the Gibson ES-150 marked a critical turning point, when the momentum of electric guitar production began to shift from “Hawaiian” model guitars, designed to be played with a steel bar run along the strings—which included the famed Rickenbacker “Frying Pan” model—to “Spanish”-style guitars built to be played in the more conventional manner, with the fingers of the guitarist fretting the individual notes and chords. This change prefigured the broader incorporation of the electric guitar into jazz and other popular styles, where it assumed significantly greater visibility than it had before. Further efforts to refine and reconfigure the instrument came to concentrate on the drive to create a solid body, Spanish-style instrument—to be distinguished from the solid body Hawaiian guitar models that already existed. In the interplay between “Hawaiian” and “Spanish” electric guitar designs lies the cultural background to the emergence of the modern solid body electric, realized in the fabled 1950s models produced by Fender and Gibson.

While the advent of the solid body electric guitar was undoubtedly a milestone in the history of the instrument, it is a mistake to assume that the design subsumed all others. After all, Scotty Moore and Chuck Berry are just two pioneering musicians who continued to favor hollow-bodied instruments long after the solid body became available. The continued evolution of the hollow body electric guitar is an oft-overlooked aspect of the 1950s that sheds light on the multidimensional character of the instrument and the adaptability of guitar manufacturers. Similarly, while the enduring influence of Fender and Gibson is undeniable, several other guitar companies contributed to the spread and proliferation of the electric guitar and produced instruments that were comparably prized, or more affordable and easier to obtain, including Gretsch, Harmony, and Kay. The electric guitar’s golden age was defined as much by an expanding production and distribution network as it was by the growing hegemony of a select number of manufacturers, and low-budget instruments—many purchased through mail order catalogs—played a role in this era’s burgeoning guitar culture that is too often ignored or discounted. What follows, then, is a sort of alternate history of the era often seen as a sort of high point in the evolution of the electric guitar. By downplaying the centrality of the “classics,” I seek to cut through the mythology that so often informs consideration of this period, and to put the solid body Spanish electric in its proper context as just one piece of a larger series of developments through which the electric guitar rose to prominence.

EH or ES?

When the Ro-Pat-In guitar company—soon to be renamed Rickenbacker—issued its first electric guitars in 1932, it offered both Hawaiian and Spanish model guitars. Yet only the company’s Hawaiian model—officially called the Electro Hawaiian guitar, but retrospectively dubbed the Frying Pan for its unusual shape—has been flagged as the first commercially produced electric guitar of note. The earliest Electro Spanish electric guitar has been rendered little more than a footnote in most available histories of the instrument, and the same can be said for other early Spanish-style electric guitars issued in generally very small quantities by companies such as Vivi-Tone and Dobro.² At its inception, the electric guitar gained most ready acceptance in its guise as a Hawaiian-style instrument, designed to accommodate a playing style where the guitar was laid horizontally in the lap of the musician and played with the use of a metal bar that would slide up and down the fretted strings—otherwise known as “steel guitar.” Why was the Hawaiian electric guitar so prevalent in this early phase? And when did the Spanish electric guitar gain more currency?

To begin to answer the first question, it is worth noting that George Beauchamp, whose electric guitar designs had the most enduring impact among the instrument’s first founders, was a dedicated Hawaiian guitar enthusiast. By the mid 1920s, Beauchamp was an established vaudeville performer particularly known for his talent on the steel guitar, and photos from this period show him holding his instrument across his lap in the “Hawaiian” fashion and wearing a lei.³ In this, he was far from alone. Interest in Hawaiian steel guitar began to grow in the first decade of the twentieth century, spurred by the move to San Francisco of the style’s primary innovator, indigenous Hawaiian musician Joseph Kekuku. West Coast guitar makers quickly took note of Kekuku’s rising stature as he entered the professional vaudeville circuit. Steel guitar historian John Troutman describes the efforts of luthier Chris Knutsen, who learned from Kekuku and other players of the era that they required

By the mid 1910s, the priorities of steel guitarists had already begun to give rise to a distinct class of instruments. Not only did these instruments use wire strings, but they would be built with higher action—with the strings at more of a distance from the fretboard—to allow for smoother motion of the steel bar. The imperatives behind steel guitar construction continued to exert a pronounced effect on guitar builders in the ensuing decades, in conjunction with widening popular interest in Hawaiian musical styles. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the ubiquity of Hawaiian music, and steel guitar playing especially, on the West Coast throughout these years was a major reason why Southern California became a sort of ground zero for the electric guitar’s successful invention.

Many of the earliest guitar manufacturers to produce electric instruments, including Ro-Pat-In, were relatively new enterprises seeking to make a mark through design innovation. Hawaiian guitars not only appealed to musicians drawn to the popular style of playing but had the aura of a design with less history or tradition attached. The promotional copy for the Frying Pan announced, “Peculiar looking because no resonating body is needed.”⁵ Made from aluminum rather than traditional wood, the Frying Pan drew attention to its own modernity, even apart from its capacity for amplification. As guitar historians Brad Tolinski and Alan di Perna observed, “This was a completely new breed of instrument—clearly and unapologetically an industrial product rather than a finely crafted artifact.”⁶ By comparison, the Electro Spanish electric model resembled the more standard unamplified guitar designs of the day. This was one of the most salient ways in which the difference between “Hawaiian” and “Spanish” guitars operated during the early 1930s. A “Spanish” guitar was seen to be directly connected to the longer history of the instrument and more established styles of musicianship, whereas a “Hawaiian” guitar offered more room for instrument makers—and players—to experiment and take liberties.

Unsurprisingly, given these trends, when the Gibson company entered the fold of electric guitar production, its first product was an electric Hawaiian guitar. The Gibson EH-150, first produced in 1935, emerged through the combined input of company employee Walter Fuller and professional guitarist Alvino Rey.⁷ An electric Spanish guitar, the ES-150, followed shortly thereafter, developed in 1936 and entering wider production the next year. Following suit from Ro-Pat-In’s template, the Gibson EH-150 was a distinctively shaped solid body instrument, markedly different from conventional guitars of the era. The ES-150 Spanish model, by contrast, was essentially a refashioned version of an already existing Gibson acoustic instrument, the L-50, a budget-priced archtop guitar to which the company affixed the same sort of pickup developed for use on the electric Hawaiian.

In this case, however, the ES-150 was the greater innovation. A comparatively more venerable instrument manufacturer than its competitors, Gibson brought to the electric guitar an established reputation for high quality, and its acoustic archtop guitars became the industry standard during the 1920s. To successfully “amplify” one of these already popular models was a major step forward in the marketing of the electric guitar as a technology that appeared accessible to working guitarists. As I have written elsewhere, the ES-150 combined “the modernism of the new sound technology with a neoclassical design that signified craftsmanship and respectability.”⁸ Upon its release, the electric Spanish guitar began to assume greater prominence.

The change was not immediate. Based on a small clutch of articles that appeared in the leading US music magazines, DownBeat and Metronome, the electric guitar remained strongly identified with the Hawaiian guitar throughout most of the 1930s. Jack Miller, a white guitarist widely reputed to have been one of the first musicians to perform in public and on record with an electric instrument, penned two brief articles for DownBeat in May and July 1936, in which he foregrounds his experience as an amplified steel guitar player.⁹ Rival publication Metronome offered readers of its November 1936 issue the declaration, “The electric Hawaiian, or steel, guitar is now a standard instrument in our most popular dance orchestras. It’s new, it’s modern, it’s electric! That prefix, electric, has captured the interest and imagination of every radio listener.”¹⁰ The following summer, the publication featured steel guitarist Anthony Rocco making the case for the greater incorporation of steel guitar into the era’s dance bands.¹¹

Yet advertisements from these publications also show the growing prominence of the electric Spanish instrument. When electric guitar ads first started to appear in DownBeat in 1935–36, they were almost exclusively for Hawaiian guitars. By the fall of 1937, however, Gibson was joined by two other companies—Vega and National Dobro—in advertising Hawaiian and Spanish electric guitars side by side, and giving them relatively equal billing. These incremental steps in the wider promotion of the electric Spanish guitar set the stage for the instrument’s embrace at decade’s end, indicated by the rise of African American jazz guitarist Charlie Christian. Upon joining bandleader Benny Goodman’s sextet in 1939, Christian became so much associated with his use of the Gibson ES-150 that the guitar’s distinctive bar-shaped pickup became known as the “Charlie Christian pickup.”¹² When Gibson chose to feature Christian and fellow Goodman guitarist Arnold Covey in a large February 1940 display ad in DownBeat trumpeting the features of its “new Gibson electric Spanish guitar,” the instrument was clearly gaining stature as a representative electric guitar, no longer in the shadow of its Hawaiian counterpart.¹³

Solid

A year later, in 1941, guitarist and inventor Les Paul completed work on his solid body electric prototype, “the Log.” One of the most storied non-production electric instruments ever made, the Log derived its name from its unusual construction. Working in the factory of the Epiphone guitar company, Paul fashioned the instrument out of a solid 4″ × 4″ piece of pine wood, to which he added “wings” that were carved from the body of an Epiphone archtop guitar to standardize its appearance.¹⁴ Explaining his motivation for pursuing a solid body instrument in a column for Guitar Player magazine, Paul recalled: “The whole concept of making a solid body instrument goes back into the middle Thirties and early Forties when I built several solid body instruments, which proved you could get this great sustaining tone. You also could get rid of the resonant peaks that would make one note louder than another.”¹⁵ Paul was driven by the desire for a sort of purity and uniformity of tone that was not available on the hollow body electric guitars of the time, and that suited the nimble and precise musicianship that he displayed as a leading jazz guitar soloist of the late 1930s and early 1940s.¹⁶

The idea for a solid body electric guitar had been circulating for as long as the electric guitar had been around. Ro-Pat-In’s Frying Pan was a solid body instrument, and so too were some of the other Hawaiian electric guitars produced during the 1930s. A solid body Spanish electric was slower to materialize, however. Several factors inhibited the development of such instruments. As noted above, Spanish electric guitars remained more beholden to their acoustic counterparts in the early history of the instrument; and indeed, one of the selling points of the Gibson ES-150 and other available models was that the hollow body meant they could be played unamplified as well as plugged in. A solid body guitar would also necessarily be heavier, and for guitars that were not meant to be played flat on a player’s lap or accompanying stand but were held upright and often strapped over a guitarist’s shoulder, the extra weight could produce strain and would require adjustment. Despite these impediments, Les Paul noticed a basic tension as he grew more familiar with his electric instrument. He recounted in a 1977 interview, “Early on, I figured out that when you’ve got the top [of the guitar] vibrating and a string vibrating, one of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound.”¹⁷ The Log was the result of his pursuits, but just one of a series of such efforts that he crafted or commissioned from the late 1930s onward.

Others working in the world of guitar construction were applying similar principles. In 1943, Leo Fender, at the time operating a radio repair service in Fullerton, California, colluded with more seasoned guitar tinkerer Doc Kaufmann to build a small and unusually shaped instrument. The guitar was created mainly as a vehicle to test a new pickup design that Fender had devised. Its miniature, unornamented body had the appearance of a Hawaiian steel guitar, but it was, in fact, a Spanish-style electric, and not incidentally, it was a solid body instrument.¹⁸ It would be more than five years before Fender would dedicate himself in a more concerted manner to the production of a solid body Spanish electric guitar, but many of the ideas that would inform his later efforts were already in place in this early prototype. Then there was a third Southern California-based craftsman, Paul Bigsby, who followed instructions provided to him by esteemed country guitarist Merle Travis to assemble a fully realized solid body Spanish electric guitar in 1948.¹⁹ The Travis-Bigsby guitar, as it has been called, may have been the most compelling proof of concept yet that a solid body Spanish electric was a viable property. It had the shape of a standard guitar, not requiring wings or other add-ons to normalize its appearance. Travis quickly began to feature the guitar in his performances, treating it as a favored instrument. Yet Bigsby showed no inclination to convert his design into something suitable for mass production. That step would be left to Fender.

The solid body Spanish electric guitar, then, was like the electric guitar itself not the invention of a single individual but an idea that was realized over time, with multiple contributors playing a role. Paul, Fender, and Bigsby (and the many other players like Merle Travis whose suggestions helped inform their efforts) were all motivated by a common insight: the vibrations of the guitar’s body that made an unamplified guitar sound pleasing could be a detriment to the sound of an electric guitar. Minimizing or eliminating those vibrations would significantly decrease the likelihood of disruptive feedback from the guitar’s amplifier, create a more even and balanced tone across the full range of the instrument, and offer the player greater sustain of the individual notes played. The sensibility here mirrors what Kyle Devine describes in Chapter 6 as “signal thinking,” a term he adapts from historian of science Emily Thompson. Writing about the modern era of acoustic research, Thompson observed: “When electroacoustic instruments like microphones and loudspeakers moved out of the laboratory and into the world, this new way of thinking migrated with them, and the result was that sounds were reconceived as signals.”²⁰ George Beauchamp worked according to similar principles when assembling the Frying Pan years earlier, but finding the right balance of features that would make a conventionally designed solid body instrument functional, practical, and desirable to players required considerable trial and error. Throughout the 1940s, the idea for a solid body electric gestated and provided the basis for a series of critical experiments that pushed the concept forward. In the 1950s, these pursuits came to fruition.

Advancing the Hollow Body

Scotty Moore, the guitarist who accompanied Elvis Presley throughout the first several years of his recording and performing career, developed a signature style that revolved around clean, finger-picked lines that blurred the distinction between rhythm and lead guitar. Like many of the white Southern musicians that contributed to the early years of rock ’n’ roll, Moore was steeped in the influence of country music and, as a guitarist, was especially attentive to the innovations of Chet Atkins, whose own finger-picking guitar style provided a powerful and versatile template. Before he joined forces with Presley, Moore was an early adopter of the Fender Telecaster, obtaining a model in 1952, just a year after it was first made available.²¹ However, he found it unsatisfactory, less for its sound than for its size and comfort. Interviewed by British journalists John Tobler and Stuart Grundy in 1983, Moore recounted:

In other words, Moore—one of the unquestioned architects of early rock ’n’ roll guitar style—expressly rejected the new solid body electrics and favored hollow body guitars for the duration of his career.

Moore’s preferences were far from isolated. Tempting as it is to judge that the solid body Spanish electric was integral to the rise of rock ’n’ roll given the synchronicity of its emergence, it would take more than a decade for the Telecaster, Stratocaster, and Les Paul guitars to become the dominant instruments of choice among rock guitarists. Certainly, there were some crucial rock ’n’ rollers who took to the new instruments quickly. Buddy Holly has been famously identified with the Fender Stratocaster, and Carl Perkins used a Gibson Les Paul when he made his breakthrough recordings for Sun Records, including “Blue Suede Shoes.” Yet even Perkins soon changed his allegiance from the Les Paul to a Gibson hollow body, the ES-5 Switchmaster, a higher end instrument that cost nearly $200 more than the company’s solid body model.²³ While the solid body unquestionably made a difference to the longer term evolution of rock guitar playing, the electric guitar as such was the bigger factor in the emergence of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, and hollow-bodied instruments remained common among its dominant practitioners.

Chuck Berry was another case in point. Berry was not an absolutist about the solid body vs hollow body divide, and he was known to play a Gibson Les Paul at times during the mid to late 1950s. His overarching preference, though, was for hollow body instruments, and the bulk of his signature recordings, starting with his breakthrough 1955 single, “Maybellene,” were made using a Gibson ES-350 T. Discussing his guitar preferences in a 1988 interview, Berry noted:

The Gibson ES-350 T was adapted from an earlier Gibson hollow body, the ES-350, that had been the first of Gibson’s electric guitars to feature a cutaway when it was produced in 1947.²⁵ The cutaway allowed precisely the sort of reach up the neck that Berry favored so strongly when interviewed forty years later. Issued in 1955, the ES-350 T would have just been released at the time that Berry purchased his and began to record with it. It was distinguished from its predecessor by its thinner body and a more slender neck with a shorter scale length, which would have made it both lighter and better suited to the sort of rapidly played patterns for which Berry became known.²⁶ One of Berry’s ES-350 T guitars would eventually be obtained by the US National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2011, confirming its identification with the guitarist and its status as a key symbol of Black musical creativity.²⁷

Outside rock ’n’ roll proper, another of the era’s most influential players demonstrated a parallel commitment to hollow body instruments. Blues artist B.B. King’s attachment to his electric guitar became the stuff of legend. As recounted in his autobiography, King first began to call his guitar Lucille after rescuing it from a fire in a bar where he played, which was caused by two men fighting over a woman who bore the same name. That first guitar was not even a proper electric guitar but a Gibson L-30 hollow body archtop model to which King had added a pickup. Lucille, however, was no single guitar but rather a name that King gave to the ideal relationship that he had with his instrument. He explained:

Among the assortment of guitars that King relied upon was a Fender Telecaster, which he played for a time in the early 1950s, and a Gibson ES-5, the same mid 1950s hollow body guitar that came to be favored by Carl Perkins. The guitar with which he would most be identified, though, was the Gibson ES-355, which upon its release in 1958 became one of the first of the “semi-hollow body” electrics produced by the company.

As the term would suggest, a semi-hollow body guitar is something of a hybrid instrument. The Gibson ES-355 was a deluxe offshoot of another model introduced the same year, the ES-335. Both guitars were devised by Gibson company head Ted McCarty, whose idea was to produce an instrument that could split the difference between the hollow body guitar’s tonal warmth and the solid body’s sharpness. Said McCarty: “we needed something for the player who wanted the body reverberation of an acoustic and more highs than, say, an L-5 but not as much treble as a solidbody. The 335 was an in-between deal.”²⁹ Distinguished visually by its double cutaway design—a first for a hollow body electric—the true secret to the ES-335 and ES-355 was the solid block of wood that ran through the guitar’s interior mid-section, which significantly diminished the body’s reverberation and created a tone more akin to a solid body. Another innovation incorporated onto these Gibson models was the humbucking pickup that had been designed by engineer Seth Lover. Seeking to reduce the unwanted electronic hum that existing pickup designs routinely generated, Lover produced a pickup with two sets of magnetic coils rather than the standard single coil.³⁰ By mitigating the stray noises that an electric guitar and amplifier were likely to emit, the humbucker helped to further split the difference between hollow body and solid body guitars, since the hollow bodies had always been more subject to feedback and other forms of sonic interference.

Humbucking pickups were also a feature on another of the era’s signature hollow body electric guitars, the Gretsch Chet Atkins model. At the time of its 1955 release, Gretsch was a wide-ranging instrument manufacturer whose guitars did not have the prestige associated with the likes of Gibson. Pursuing a relationship with country music star Atkins was rather explicitly an effort by the company to emulate the success that Gibson had with the Les Paul; and while Atkins did not have Paul’s star power at the time, he enjoyed a significant reputation among musicians and country music enthusiasts. The hollow body Gretsch bearing Atkins’ name was produced with considerable input from the guitarist, although the ornate and rather kitschy “Western” touches—including a large branded “G” on the instrument’s lower bout—were solely the work of the Gretsch design team.³¹ However, Atkins was dissatisfied with a key feature of the earliest models, the DeArmond pickups, which did not have the requisite clarity and dynamic range to showcase his dexterous finger-style technique. Atkins turned to a Nashville associate, Ray Butts, an expert in electronics who had previously built an amplifier for the guitarist. Butts proceeded to design a humbucking pickup in parallel to the work that Seth Lover did at Gibson, noting of his collaboration with Atkins:

Once it was completed, Gretsch became convinced that the new pickup design was an improvement over the ones they had been using. The company christened the new device the Filter Tron, in a characteristic bit of flamboyant branding, and it became a regular feature on the Chet Atkins model and several other Gretsch electric guitars by 1958.

Solid body instruments may have been the state of the art as the 1950s dawned. The foregoing examples attest to the fact that the hollow body electric guitar hardly remained a static presence throughout the decade, though. Some guitarists may well have favored the hollow body because of its comparatively longer history, its association with key influences of the recent past, or because it continued to allow them some of the benefits of an acoustic instrument and electric instrument combined. Others preferred the sound over that offered by the solid body or, as we see in the case of Scotty Moore, the fuller body shape, which gave them something more substantial to hold. Whatever the motivations, the hollow body electric was not a simple index of “tradition” when opposed to the solid body’s “modernity.” It was subject to design advances that were stimulated in part by the more competitive market for electric guitars that grew throughout the decade, and in part by the continuing impulse to refine and improve electric guitar design for its own sake. The advent of the semi-hollow body and the humbucker pickup, meanwhile, suggest that improved tone remained an overarching factor that pushed design innovations forward. In the evolution of the hollow body electric, and the electric guitar more generally during the 1950s, we can see exemplified the maxim put forth by musicologists Robert Fink, Melinda Latour, and Zachary Wallmark, that “tone is the desirable fetish that pop musicians pursue relentlessly, just because … it can never really be captured, can never be reduced to the immutable qualities of a single, inanimate object.”³³

The Cheaper the Axe

One trend remained in place throughout the 1950s: the most high-end hollow body instruments were, as a rule, more expensive than top-of-the-line solid body electrics. A 1955 price guide shows that Fender charged $189.50 for its Telecaster and $249.50 for the newer Stratocaster equipped with a tremolo bar.³⁴ That same year, Gibson offered its standard Les Paul solid body electric for $235, and a premium Les Paul Custom for $360. Among the company’s hollow body electrics, on the other hand, several models were priced above $400, with higher prices for guitars with a “natural” finish, including the Switchmaster at $475, the Byrdland at $565, the L-5 at $590, and the S-400 at $675.³⁵ None of these guitars were especially cheap. Even the Telecaster would have been a bit of a stretch for many guitar consumers, and its seemingly modest price converts to nearly $2,000 in current dollar value.³⁶ The hollow body electrics, then, were true luxury instruments that were valued for their high level of craftsmanship and association with established players.

Gibson did offer some cheaper electric models, with a budget Les Paul Junior costing $110 and a hollow body ES-125 priced at $135. Yet Gibson, Fender, and other leading “name brand” guitar manufacturers did not aim to offer instruments at the lowest possible price point. They pursued a balance between cost and quality that would allow them to maintain a reputation for well-built instruments. For the parent shopping for a young child just learning to play, the teenager whose earnings were limited, or for the more economically disenfranchised portions of the population, purchasing an electric guitar would have remained out of reach if these instruments were their only options. Most likely, these consumers would have turned to the guitars offered through mail order catalogs and department stores that were marketed not for professional musicians but to beginners and those who had less money or motivation to invest. The manufacturers of these instruments were less well known and, indeed, often remained anonymous to consumers, but without them, the electric guitar market would not have grown as it did. Fender and Gibson made the electric guitar into a widely coveted item, but the less prestigious and more affordable brands established the instrument as a household object.

Sears, Roebuck and Company played a crucial role in making musical instruments, including the electric guitar, into mass market commodities. The Chicago-based mail order retail company offered musical instruments in its catalog as early as 1894, and made a major move into the guitar market with the purchase of the Harmony Company in 1916.³⁷ Formed in 1892, Harmony had grown by the 1910s to become one of the largest producers of string instruments in the US, and its share of the guitar market would grow through its association with Sears, at one point producing more than half the total number of guitars made in the US.³⁸ Upon purchasing the company, Sears began selling Harmony guitars under its own Supertone brand, a name it retained until the 1930s when it shifted to Silvertone. Giving the appearance that its instruments were a singular brand, the Silvertone name was applied to guitars made by several different manufacturers over the years; and in fact, the first Sears Silvertone electric guitars were made not by Harmony but by the National/Valco company in the early 1940s.³⁹ By that time, Sears had sold its interest in Harmony but would continue to rely on the company’s instruments, while also sourcing an increased amount of its Silvertone stock from another Chicago-based guitar manufacturer, Kay. In the 1950s, the newly formed Danelectro company also began supplying Sears with electric instruments for its Silvertone line, and these four manufacturers together generated the varied selection of acoustic and electric instruments offered by the retailer throughout the decade.

Like Harmony, Kay was already a company with a long history by the time it began its association with Sears. In fact, under its previous incarnation as the Stromberg-Voisinet Company, it had advertised what many consider to be the first commercially produced amplified guitar in 1928, discussed by Matthew Hill in the preceding chapter. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Stromberg-Voisinet—which changed its name to Kay sometime between 1931 and 1934, according to guitar historian Michael Wright—provided guitars for Sears competitor Montgomery Ward and other retailers.⁴⁰ After its early and somewhat stunted entrance into the electric guitar market, it began offering electric instruments more routinely starting in 1936, the same year that the Gibson ES-150 was first produced. The association between Kay and Sears began in 1940, and for the next two decades, the company’s guitars were a major component of the Silvertone brand. Meanwhile, Kay continued to develop instruments under its own brand name as well, producing its first solid body electric guitar in 1952 along with the popular Kay “Thin Twin” electric guitar that became associated with prominent electric blues singer and guitarist Jimmy Reed.⁴¹ More than a low-budget guitar manufacturer, Kay showed the diversification that had entered electric guitar production by the 1950s, with prices that, at the low end, were often less than half that of the more prestigious manufacturers but with “quality” instruments that occupied the same price range as the Telecaster or Les Paul.

Leafing through the pages of a Kay guitar catalog from the mid 1950s reveals something of this diversification, but it is more instructive to compare Kay’s own dedicated product line with that offered by Sears during the same period. For 1956, Kay produced a rather compact eight-page catalog, featuring on the cover its K172S “Pro” guitar, a single cutaway hollow body electric archtop priced at $200.⁴² Most electric guitars in the catalog are priced between $100 and $200, including the Thin Twin at $175 and the K142 solid body electric at $125. However, Kay also offered much cheaper options for both hollow body and solid body instruments, with the K130 archtop costing just $57.50, and K136 solid body only $12 more.

By comparison, for its 1956 Spring–Summer catalog, Sears devoted three pages to its Silvertone guitar line and another to amplifiers, out of a total of nearly 1,400 catalog pages in total.⁴³ Only one page is dedicated to electric guitars, but it includes eight different electric Spanish models and two Hawaiian models—a ratio that represents the changing face of the electric guitar since the 1930s. The cheapest of the electric Spanish models, a single pickup hollow body, costs only $24.95, while the company offers a solid body electric for just $39.95, or $59.95 for a two-pickup option. Prices graduate accordingly throughout the eight models, with the high point reserved for the “Professional Dual-Pickup Cutaway Electric Guitar,” a hollow body instrument costing $137.50. With its Silvertone line, then, Sears dramatically undercut the existing electric guitar market, even relative to the instruments produced by its own suppliers. Just as importantly, we see through the Silvertone line how innovations in electric guitar design were translated into terms that were accessible and affordable to the nonspecialist player, thus expanding the instrument’s reach.

Ascension

One could well observe that the true “golden age,” or peak of the electric guitar’s commercial and cultural impact, was the 1960s and not the period before. Certainly, in terms of sales, the boom of the 1950s was substantially outpaced by the spike in sales that occurred after The Beatles arrived in the US. As noted above, the Telecaster, Stratocaster, and Les Paul found much wider acceptance in the 1960s as they became the guitars of choice for such players as Eric Clapton, Michael Bloomfield, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck, and Jimi Hendrix, among others. The era’s surge of “garage bands” also indicated the spread of amateur guitarists who sought to emulate the leading bands of the day and who sometimes became regular gigging and recording musicians in their own right.

In real and tangible ways, the ascent of the electric guitar in the 1960s was built on the developments of the preceding decades. It took nearly two decades from the time of its initial production as a regular consumer item for the electric guitar to take its modern shape. The shift from Hawaiian to Spanish electrics was the first necessary precondition for the instrument to move more to the center of American musical life. Even by the late 1940s, that shift was still not fully resolved, as can be gleaned from the fact that Leo Fender focused almost exclusively on producing steel guitars until he turned his attention to the solid body Spanish electric in 1949.⁴⁴ This instrument marked another significant advance and, as much as anything, consolidated the notion that the Spanish electric guitar would be the electric guitar for the majority of the instrument’s players. Throughout the 1950s, guitar manufacturers continued to set new standards for the instrument regarding solid body and hollow body instruments alike, and both types of the electric guitar were central to the musical innovations that altered existing genres such as blues and country music, and helped give rise to the emerging form of rock ’n’ roll. The expansion of the electric guitar market, meanwhile, also meant the proliferation of instruments across different price points and of variable quality, but that nonetheless made it a more accessible item with a wider reach. Certain products of this era—the Stratocaster, the Les Paul—have been elevated to the status of canonic objects, but they are just the residue of these broader processes that made the electric guitar into an engine of musical transformation.

Introduction

As I enter my local Guitar Center (GC), I pass a large picture, featuring Robert Cray, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Jimmie Vaughan, each holding his Fender Stratocaster guitar, and on the verge, it seems, of launching into a blistering blues solo. Further inside the store and stretched across one long wall above racks of electric guitars in many designs and colors, amplifiers of various shapes and sizes, and stacks of hard-shell guitar cases, are enormous images of another collection of iconic guitarists: Randy Rhoads, Miguel Rascón, Joe Satriani, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Setzer, Carlos Santana, and Jimmy Page. As it turns out, this Rochester (New York State) location is not very different from the hundreds of other GC stores that have sprung up across the United States since the mid 1990s. The musicians in these prominent displays are there because the playing of at least one of these guitarists—and probably more than one—is likely well known to GC customers. We represent the musical worlds, these oversized pictures seem to say, that the gear in this shop will help the dedicated guitarist conjure up, and these masters of great and gallant fretboard deeds are your inspiration—they are your guitar heroes.¹

In the history of rock music, the rise of the guitar hero can be traced to the mid 1960s and tied to the increasingly important role of virtuosic guitar soloing. Masterful soloing was not new in pop and rock before then, however: in the years before rock’s emergence around 1955, guitarist Les Paul had made flashy solo playing a key feature of his hits with Mary Ford, including “How High the Moon” (1951) and “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” (1951).² Guitar soloing sometimes played an important role in rock music during its first decade: Danny Cedrone delivered a virtuosic solo on Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” (1954), for instance, while Chuck Berry’s trademark guitar bursts on hits such as “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956) and “Johnny B. Goode” (1957), though perhaps less virtuosic in a strictly guitar-technical sense, were nevertheless a key element in his style. Instrumental tracks such as Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser” (1958), The Ventures’ “Walk Don’t Run” (1960), The Chantays’ “Pipeline” (1962), and Dick Dale’s “Misirlou” (1962), in addition to a string of UK hits by The Shadows during the early 1960s, showcased the guitar as the main melodic instrument, though mostly without virtuosity or technical flash as a central feature (aside from Dale’s furious tremolo picking).³

It was this melodic approach to guitar soloing, always subordinate to the sung sections of a song, that served as the basis for George Harrison’s solos with The Beatles, as well as Keith Richards’ solos with The Rolling Stones in the mid 1960s. Roger McGuinn’s electric 12-string solos with The Byrds were also of this melodic variety, with the notable exception of his frantic, John Coltrane-inspired playing on “Eight Miles High” (1966). Jeff Beck’s playing with The Yardbirds on hits such as “Heart Full of Soul” (1965) and “Over Under Sideways Down” (1966) anticipates the virtuosic turn that would be central to the emergence of the guitar hero in rock—a rise that can be attributed primarily to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton in the mid to late 1960s. The idea of a guitar solo being an important focus of a recording or performance, rather than a subordinate element of contrast in juxtaposition with sung sections, came into clear focus in a series of albums by The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream, released between 1966 and 1968. While there were sung sections that were important on many of these tracks, the solos often were just as crucial and, perhaps in some cases, even more important to the track and its appeal. Frequently on such tracks, the solo’s the thing; and the guitarist who makes the solo compelling is the hero.

The Hippie Aesthetic and the Rise of Virtuosity

To get a better sense of the historical conditions in which the idea of the guitar hero developed, it would be useful to consider briefly the broader context of rock history in the second half of the 1960s and into the 1970s. Elsewhere I have argued that rock music from the mid 1960s to the end of the 1970s—or roughly from The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) to Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979)—can be understood according to the “hippie aesthetic.”⁴ The hippie aesthetic pulls together a number of elements in rock music that can be found—at least in part and sometimes altogether—in most rock music during this period. These elements fall into five general categories and help organize the ways in which rock musicians became increasingly ambitious about their music, in some cases building on practices that had begun earlier in the 1960s:

• Lyrics deal with serious themes, not teen life and romance, often as a concept album, with coordinated packaging/album art which is in some cases extended to live performance.

• Musical features often associated with classical music, both avant-garde and common practice, as well as with jazz, are often present.

• There is a new and sometimes pronounced emphasis on instrumental virtuosity, often modeled on classical music and jazz.

• Continued emphasis on technology, including the expansion of multitrack recording and ever more sophisticated synthesizers and signal processing, is common.

• There is a continued development of the idea that the rock musician is an “artist” who must explore new possibilities and push musical boundaries, rather than a “craftsperson” who repeats formulas.

The last of these categories is perhaps the most fundamental to the hippie aesthetic overall. Rock musicians increasingly moved away from the idea of being performers singing short and catchy pop songs to being artists who wrote and arranged their own music, aspiring to play like skilled professionals (and projecting that image to fans) while seeking new sounds, drawing from a wide range of styles, and addressing “serious” issues in the lyrics. This sense of ambition and seriousness of purpose extended to the recording, packaging, and on-stage presentation: an album became a listening experience freely employing any technical advantage the recording studio could provide, the album art was coordinated with the lyrics and/or “vibe” of the music, and live performances employed lights, projections, and even props to heighten the experience of the music. Indeed, it is difficult to find a rock act from these years that does not engage at least two of the categories listed above in a significant way.⁵ Consider, for instance, The Who’s Tommy (1969), Jethro Tull’s Aqualung (1971), Alice Cooper’s Love It to Death (1971), Led Zeppelin IV (1971), David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972), The Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach (1972), Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973), Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974), Queen’s A Night at the Opera (1975), Eagles’ Hotel California (1976), and Billy Joel’s The Stranger (1977)—a diverse range of landmark albums that each engage various elements of the hippie aesthetic in significant ways.

Of these five dimensions of the hippie aesthetic, the increased emphasis on virtuosity is most important to the rise of the guitar hero. The rise of virtuosity, however, was not limited to guitar playing. Drummers, bassists, and keyboard players all aspired to greater technical mastery of their instruments and display of this mastery in performance. Drum sets expanded to include not only more drums but also all manner of percussion, bells, gongs, and even tympani (the drum solo became an almost required part of the live show). Keyboard rigs tended to include multiple keyboards, stacked and arranged in such a way as to allow the keyboardist to play two at a time and quickly switch among various keyboards such as organ, piano, synthesizer, Mellotron, and more. Bassists might add bass pedals on the floor and often played parts as intricate as those of the guitarists. The rise of the guitar hero thus occurred within a broader musical environment in which all band members—and their fans—were increasingly taking the musicianship seriously.

Clapton, Hendrix, and the Rise of the Guitar Hero

Eric Clapton had made his first mark in the rock world in London. Playing with The Yardbirds, he was known for his commitment to traditional electric blues, a style in which featured soloing is common. In 1963, The Beatles’ UK success opened up new opportunities for British bands in Britain, and then for British bands in the US in 1964. Like The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds had started out as an electric blues band in the style of Alexis Korner’s Blues Inc. Nevertheless, the possibility of commercial success in this new market found The Yardbirds in the recording studio in early 1965, recording a pop song by songwriter Graham Gouldman. “For Your Love” was not a blues number, and to make matters worse from Clapton’s perspective, he was not allowed to perform on the entire single, but only in the middle section (the main section instead featured harpsichord). Clapton quit the band soon after this session to devote himself to blues, walking away from what would become a hit record and joining John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, who were, by comparison, more a respected act than a commercial success. In the context of the emerging hippie aesthetic, Clapton’s rejection of the prospect of pop-star fame—a rejection for now, anyway—and his overt commitment to his blues playing confirmed a musical seriousness of purpose (as perceived by other musicians and by fans in the UK) that was a crucial early step in the emergence of the guitar hero. As it turned out, Clapton’s time with the Bluesbreakers would be off and on, and by the second half of 1966, he had teamed up with bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker to form Cream; the trio’s debut album, Fresh Cream, was released in December 1966.⁶

At about the same time as Cream was forming in London, Animals’ bassist Chas Chandler heard Jimi Hendrix perform in New York’s Café Wha? Shifting to the role of manager, Chandler convinced Hendrix to relocate to London, where with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, The Jimi Hendrix Experience was formed. The new Chandler-managed trio released its first album, Are You Experienced?, in May 1967. Hendrix’s playing was not only virtuosic but full of show business flamboyance: Hendrix would play guitar behind his head, with his teeth, and sometimes rub himself up against his tall Marshall amplifier in sexual ways. He would, on occasion, smash his guitar (as The Who’s Pete Townshend had done) and light his guitar on fire.⁷ Hendrix, however, initially needed some convincing about the move to London and asked Chandler if he could introduce him to Eric Clapton, whose playing he admired. Clapton and Hendrix first met in London during October 1966 and remained good friends going forward, sometimes visiting clubs and sitting in with other artists together.⁸

Over the next two years, and with a strong dose of friendly competition, Cream and the Experience released a series of albums in alternation that progressively raised the bar for guitar virtuosity and established the idea of the guitar hero in rock (see Table 4.1).⁹ To briefly survey this development, consider Cream’s version of Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful” from their debut album. The track is about six and a half minutes in length, with a minute and a half (2:20–3:52) devoted to Clapton’s solo. The track “Are You Experienced” from the first Hendrix album clocks in at four minutes, with slightly over a minute (1:40–2:42) devoted to the (backward-tape) guitar solo. In both cases, the solos are a principal feature of the track, showcasing the skill and creativity of each guitarist.¹⁰ Moving forward to 1968, Cream’s live version of “Spoonful” appears on Wheels of Fire, running to more than sixteen minutes; Clapton’s solo begins at about the three-minute mark and extends mostly unbroken for more than ten minutes until the return of the sung section of the track at 13:32. Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” on Electric Ladyland extends to almost fifteen minutes, with extended guitar solos prominently featured along with an organ solo by guest Steve Winwood, drum soloing from Mitchell, and Hendrix’s own vocals.¹¹ Though recorded in the studio, it captures the spontaneous feel of a live performance and offers a useful comparison to Cream’s live “Spoonful.” In these two tracks released on the third album from each band (in the six-album sequence shown in Table 4.1), this marked expansion of the featured solo indicates a clear development of the guitar solo as a central element in the rise of the guitar hero. It is important to note as well, however, that extended improvisation on lengthy studio tracks or in live performance was an important element in the hippie aesthetic more generally, though in the case of Clapton and Hendrix, their virtuosity mostly developed out of blues soloing rather than out of classical or jazz influences. Pink Floyd, under the leadership of Syd Barrett in London and the Grateful Dead in San Francisco, for instance, both made extended improvisation central to their live shows. Extended soloing could also be heard on tracks such as The Doors’ “Light My Fire” (1967) and, perhaps most notoriously, Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (1968). Clapton and Hendrix thus did not invent this practice but rather employed it to create extended showcases for their guitar virtuosity.

Guitar Heroes, Classic Rock, and the Guitar Community, 1970–1985

To follow the explosive development of the guitar hero in the 1970s and into the 1980s, it will be useful to briefly specify how the term “guitar hero” will be defined going forward. There are at least three ways in which this term can be used. First, it might refer to a rock performer, often a singer, who plays guitar; Elvis Presley often performed with an acoustic guitar, for instance, though he was never much of a virtuoso—a kind of rock hero with a guitar. A second instance would be a guitarist who is considered a guitar hero by fans, though most of these fans have little basis in playing experience to determine the level of virtuosity in any given player’s performance. Pete Townshend or Keith Richards might be thought of as guitar heroes in such a case, though neither would ever make such a claim for himself. The third type is the guitarist who is admired by other guitarists—or other musicians more generally—for their skill and virtuosity: a guitarist’s guitarist. It is in this third sense that we will trace the development of the guitar hero in rock into the 1970s and beyond.¹²

Various polls have rated guitarists in music magazines over the years; sometimes these are critics’ polls, but often these are readers’ polls.¹³ The British music magazine Melody Maker, for instance, ran annual readers’ polls for many years, and the long-running DownBeat Readers’ Poll (which ranks jazz musicians) became the model for such polls in the US.¹⁴ For the purposes of this chapter, the Guitar Player (GP) Readers’ Poll provides a useful window into the guitar heroes of the 1970s in the context of a rapidly expanding community of serious-minded guitarists. Founded in 1967, GP was directed at amateur and professional players with an emphasis on playing techniques, gear, and navigating the music business.¹⁵ Surveying the late 1960s, Brad Tolinski and Alan Di Perna write: “The era also saw the advent of professional guitar journalism, starting with the first issues of Guitar Player in 1967. This phenomenon gathered considerable momentum in the seventies, with publications offering detailed articles on guitar equipment and playing techniques, not to mention the first reliable transcriptions of electric guitar rock and other genres.”¹⁶ Providing a glimpse of how securely the hippie aesthetic had taken hold among serious fans of rock music, Steve Lukather writes,

Joe Satriani adds, “It was dedicated to exactly what I was interested in. No gossip, just exciting, useful stuff about guitars, gear, artists, their music, and their approach to playing.”¹⁸ GP began an annual Readers’ Poll in February 1970, and a survey of the results of these polls reflect the opinions of the GP readers, giving us a sense of who the guitar heroes were among aspiring guitarists throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s—the era of classic rock.¹⁹

From the start, the GP polls covered a broad range of guitar styles. In the first two years, there were six categories: Rock, Electric Blues, Country, Jazz, Classical, and Folk. In 1972, four additional categories were added: Best New Artist, Best Guitar LP, Flamenco, and Best Overall. New categories were added as the years went by; the 1985 poll, for instance, included fifteen categories. The GP universe of guitar heroes is thus stylistically diverse; to track the rock guitar heroes specifically throughout the 1970s, the categories of Rock, Electric Blues, and Best Overall will be most useful. Considering the previous discussion, it is perhaps no surprise that in 1970 Jimi Hendrix won in the Rock category, while Clapton took that category in the next four years (see Table 4.2). In 1975, Clapton took the Electric Blues category, while Jeff Beck took Rock for two years in a row. Jimmy Page topped the Rock category in 1977 and 1978, while Eddie Van Halen won in 1979 and then each year through 1983. Of the rock guitarists who won Best Overall, Clapton took 1973, Beck took 1976, and Steve Howe won it for five years running beginning in 1977. Before 1981, any guitarist who won five times in the same category was placed in the Gallery of Greats and removed from further competition in that category. Of the guitarists surveyed here, blues guitarist B.B. King, Steve Howe, and Eddie Van Halen earned that distinction (indicated by asterisks in Table 4.2). In 1981, the rules were adjusted such that any guitarist who had won in more than one category in five years was eligible, and Clapton entered the Gallery in 1981 (though he was not removed from any category and went on to win again in Electric Blues the next year).

It is perhaps striking how few names occupy the top spots in these three categories over the GP polls from 1970 to 1985. Excluding B.B. King (blues), Chet Atkins (country), and John McLaughlin (jazz) from Table 4.2, the total number of rock and electric blues guitarists during this sixteen-year period is only twelve. This list of first-place finishers does not include many guitarists who placed in the top several positions in Rock and Best Overall categories; these include George Harrison, Terry Kath, Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana, Ritchie Blackmore, Dickie Betts, Jan Akkerman, Roy Buchanan, Frank Zappa, Lee Ritenour, Ted Nugent, Randy Rhoads, Rik Emmett, and Gary Moore. Combined with the first-place finishers, the total number of guitarists is still only twenty-six. In the Blues category, those who also placed below first include thirteen additional guitarists (fourteen if B.B. King is included): John Lee Hooker, Freddie King, Albert King, Buddy Guy, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Shuggie Otis, John Paul Hammond, John Mayall, Elvin Bishop, Muddy Waters, Bonnie Raitt, George Thorogood, and Billy Gibbons. Over sixteen years of voting in three categories, including some electric blues guitarists who would not have considered themselves rockers, the total number of names is only forty. And of those forty, fewer than half placed in the top three slots and recurred regularly from year to year, making the period from 1970 to 1985 relatively stable in terms of guitar heroes.²¹ Further, there are many guitarists who do not appear in these forty names: Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, and Robert Fripp of King Crimson are absent. Robin Trower (1974), Peter Frampton (1976), and Mark Knopfler (1979) each appear once in the New Talent category, while Trower’s Bridge of Sighs (1974) and Dire Straits’ debut album (1979) each win Best Guitar LP.²²

It is also worth noting that some of the most successful guitarists in these polls were not widely known rock stars by fans in general; this suggests that GP readers were privileging technical skill and artistic commitment over commercial success in their voting. While Clapton, Page, and Van Halen were all guitar heroes and rock stars, for instance, Steve Howe and Steve Morse were known mostly to fans of Yes and the Dixie Dregs, respectively. Like Howe, Morse would go on to win the Best Overall category for a fifth consecutive year in 1986, entering the Gallery of Greats. Though Morse would later join Deep Purple in 1994, touring the world and recording several albums with the band over twenty-eight years, original guitarist Ritchie Blackmore is still better known among general Deep Purple fans, perhaps due in large part to the iconic album status of Machine Head (1972) and Blackmore’s subsequent solo career, and in spite of the high regard in which Morse continues to be held within the rock guitar world. Howe has continued to record and tour with Yes and as a solo artist in the decades since these polls, while Martin has offered two Steve Howe signature models of acoustic guitar and Gibson one electric model.²³ Howe’s iconic popularity among guitarists has continued despite his moderate (at best) commercial success since the 1980s.

Also indicative of the distinctive values of the GP Readers’ Polls was the attention paid to Les Paul. By the time of these polls, Paul held iconic standing within the guitar community. Although his greatest commercial success had been in the 1950s, Paul took first place in the Jazz category in 1972 and won the Pop category two years running in 1978–1979. Paul’s success in the late 1970s comes as a result, at least in part, of the 1976 album Chester and Lester, recorded with Chet Atkins, who had won the Country category in the first five years of the GP Polls and entered the Gallery of Greats. If there was one album recorded during the 1970s that seems to have been meant specifically for the GP readership, this was it.²⁴ All of this reinforces the idea that the guitar-playing community diverged in important ways from the larger rock and pop fan community.²⁵

Low-Profile Masters of Many Styles: The Studio Guitarist as Hero

The idea that the heroes of the guitar-playing community are not always those of the general fan is further reinforced by the rise of interest during the 1970s in the studio guitarist (also referred to as “session guitarist”). Over the last several years, documentary films have focused on the session musicians at Motown (The Funk Brothers) and in Los Angeles (The Wrecking Crew).²⁶ The Stax studio band (Booker T. and the MGs), based in Memphis, has also become well known. In fact, there were cadres of session musicians in New York, London, and wherever commercial recording was done—musicians who played uncredited on thousands of hit records going back to the decades well before rock and roll. In the second half of the 1970s, GP readers became increasingly aware of studio guitarists such as Lee Ritenour and Larry Carlton, both of whom brought a jazz-rock element to recordings by a variety of artists, most especially Steely Dan. The typical studio guitarist was a consummate professional: they could solo and accompany in any style on the spot, they could read music fluently, they could frequently double on other string instruments, and they could dial in the right sound on the guitar, amp, and pedals immediately. In the kind of sessions they played, time was money, and the studio guitarist had to be able to get it right quickly and in as few takes as possible. In terms of the hippie aesthetic, this was the height of professionalism: a stylistically diverse player who could solo with the ease and virtuosity of a jazz musician and read music like a seasoned orchestral player.

GP added a category for studio guitar to the Readers’ Poll in 1977; Ritenour won the top spot in that first year and again in 1978, while Larry Carlton took it in 1979. During the next five years, Tommy Tedesco won this category, entering the Gallery of Greats after the fifth win in 1984. Tedesco had introduced a new monthly column in GP in January 1977. The first installment of Studio Log recounts a July 21, 1976, session for the television series Emergency!. Tedesco reports that he worked 4.5 hours, made $210.13, and played a Yamaha electric, a Danelectro 6-string, and a bass guitar. He includes a page from the actual part he used and provides a narrative of how the session went and some of the issues that arose.²⁷ Tedesco’s column ran until August 1990, totaling well over a hundred installments, and though each column was short, regular readers gained a strong sense of the level of musicianship, professionalism, and flexibility such a job requires. If any category in the Readers’ Poll distinguished the GP reader from the average fan, it was the Studio category: the overwhelming majority of rock fans had no idea who guitarists such as Tedesco were, while within the guitar community, they were heroes.²⁸

Heavy Metal, Guitar Heroes, and the Hippie Aesthetic

As the 1970s drew to a close, there were some in the guitar-playing community who found GP’s mostly serious and earnest approach not to their liking. According to the Complete History of Guitar World, New York publisher Stanley Harris realized that there was already

Recognizing “a situation ripe for a little competition,” Harris decided to publish a guitar magazine for “rock guys who dress in tight black jeans and leather jackets and who care about what’s happening in their world.”²⁹ The first issue of Guitar World appeared in July 1980, and in spite of any concerns about trousers, the first issue had Johnny Winter on the cover and contained a tribute to Merle Travis along with a feature on jazz fingerstyle playing. That Guitar World defined itself in terms of GP reinforces the overwhelming role GP played in the guitar-playing community. But Guitar World’s ability to find its own readership, as well as the fact that a third magazine, Guitar for the Practicing Musician, could also compete effectively in the market after its launch in 1982 (on the strength of, in part, excellent transcriptions), indicated that things were changing. Guitar World did not begin a readers’ poll until 1990, though a comparison of that poll with the GP one of the same year shows considerable overlap in winners: despite a broader range of attitudes and emphases among readers of guitar magazines, there was still significant agreement on guitar heroes. All the same, the guitar-playing community that had coalesced around GP in the 1970s was dividing in the 1980s, partly along the lines of musical style and partly according to the age of the readership.

In terms of rock history, the end of the 1970s witnessed a significant challenge to the hippie aesthetic in general and to virtuosity specifically: rock, punk, and then new wave rejected most aspects of the hippie aesthetic as bands took a back-to-basics approach, in many cases looking to rock’s pre-Sgt. Pepper past for inspiration. For punk musicians, Steve Waksman writes, “Three-chord song structures were at the heart of the rock and roll form, so three chords were all that any guitarist should need to put songs together and play in a band.”³⁰ Outside rock, disco challenged every dimension of the hippie aesthetic: it was music not so obviously focused on big ideas and musical skill, and tended to foreground a clear dance beat and strong song hooks. While conceptual elements of the hippie aesthetic would return via ambitious music videos by Michael Jackson, Eurythmics, Peter Gabriel, and others in the mid 1980s, and lyrics could still address big ideas—Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” or The Police’s “Synchronicity,” for instance—the hippie aesthetic had mostly receded in popular music by the early 1980s. One style in which the hippie aesthetic remained strong, however—and in which the guitar hero endured—was heavy metal.

Robert Walser has provided a careful study of heavy metal up to the end of the 1980s; while Walser considers many dimensions of heavy metal music and culture, he devotes considerable attention to guitar virtuosity.³¹ Walser sketches a lineage of guitarists beginning with Ritchie Blackmore in the early to mid 1970s, leading to Eddie Van Halen later in the 1970s, Randy Rhoads in the early 1980s, and Yngwie Malmsteen in the mid 1980s. According to Walser, metal guitarists modeled their approach to virtuosity on classical music, and he provides cultural, biographical, and music-analytical discussion to support his case.³² While Walser does not focus on the issue of the guitar hero per se, nor place strong emphasis on the broader issues of musical style and development occurring outside metal and in rock more generally during the period he considers, his conclusions firmly reinforce the idea that heavy metal extends the hippie aesthetic into the 1980s and beyond. Indeed, by the mid 1980s, the virtuoso guitar solo, and “shredding,” came to be strongly associated with heavy metal. Looking back at the GP Readers’ Poll winners in Table 4.2 and thinking in terms of guitar heroes in the hive mind of the guitar community, Eddie Van Halen wins the Rock category five years in a row (1979–1983), and Yngwie Malmsteen wins it in 1985 (also taking Best Album for Rising Force), continuing to place in subsequent years. Ritchie Blackmore and Randy Rhoads are also among the twenty-six rock players who finish in the top spots during that 1970–1985 stretch. As Metallica’s success unfolds in the second half of the 1980s and into the 1990s, Kirk Hammett wins in the Metal category in 1989 and 1991–1994, earning him a place in the Gallery of Greats. In the Rock category, Steve Vai (1986–1988, 1990, 1995) and Joe Satriani (1989, 1992–1994, 1996) alternate wins and enter the Gallery of Greats. All of these guitarists extend the lineage traced by Walser, further solidifying the place of the metal guitarist within the pantheon of guitar heroes.³³

The Guitar Hero Today

This survey of the guitar hero in classic rock has relied heavily on the GP readers’ polls, and secondarily on columns that appeared in that magazine. Other ways of tracing the development of the guitar hero empirically are certainly possible. Even staying within the guitar community and not extending to the larger community of fans in general, one could track the guitarists that appear on guitar magazine covers or who are featured in articles. This certainly produces a much larger pool of players; after all, no guitar magazine could afford to run features on only a couple of dozen guitarists over the course of decades.³⁴ One might also track transcriptions once they begin to appear in greater numbers in the 1980s, since these would provide a sense of which solos readers might most admire. Moving outside the guitar-playing community, one might consult polls that have appeared in music magazines in general, even including both readers’ polls and critics’ polls. In fact, a recent study compiles data from top ten lists of greatest guitarists drawn from the internet; the authors used the search term “best guitarists in the world” in a Google search (conducted in Australia in 2019) and then took the first ten lists that came up.³⁵ This methodology produced some familiar magazine websites—Guitar World and Rolling Stone, for instance—but also sites that might be less familiar to guitarists or even music fans. The authors took only the top ten names in each list and then combined the results, providing an overall ranking. While one might arrive at different results doing a search on a different term, at a different time, or from a different place, the results of this approach nonetheless contain some familiar names: the top four places go to Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Eddie Van Halen, and then to Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, and David Gilmour.

In the abstract for this meta-analysis of guitar heroes, the authors summarize the results: “Findings indicate an Anglo-American male dominance at the top of the global guitar industry, a mono-genre focus in the discourse, and an aging demographic of the guitar hero.”³⁶ The first two of these findings, male dominance and focus on rock and blues, are partly consistent with the GP polls we have considered here: although those polls were clearly male-dominated, they did range across styles, even if Best Overall tended to go to rockers. The third of these findings is revealing: consider that the last GP Readers’ Poll (1996) appeared in the February 1997 issue, more than twenty years before this meta-analysis was conducted. In this twenty-seventh annual GP poll, Eric Clapton won the Best Overall category (Eddie Van Halen took third). In fact, Clapton had won in that category the previous year (1995), as well as in the Blues category. But he was not the only oldster to make a triumphant return: Jimmy Page tied Joe Satriani to top the Rock category. And if we consider those pictures from GC in this light, they certainly represent an “aging demographic”; only Miguel Rascón is not a boomer.³⁷ Writing in 2003, Waksman observed that “rock guitar has assumed an almost ‘traditionalist’ aura for many audiences and musicians, encased in a nostalgia for past forms that in previous eras was reserved for more folk-based styles of expression.”³⁸ The guitar hero developed in the era of classic rock along with the hippie aesthetic and the expanding communities of aspiring guitarists. To walk into a guitar store today is to step into a tradition that—perhaps proudly—goes back several decades. And while young players still take lessons at local music stores, guitar instruction has spread to the internet. In the years since YouTube’s debut in 2005, for instance, guitarists have been able to access free video lessons from their phones, tablets, or laptops. Many of these instructional videos are aimed at beginners and players of modest skill (and sometimes the instructors are also of modest skill). But many YouTube videos are also meant for accomplished guitarists, featuring experienced players teaching complicated parts, riffs, solos, and more, and across a wide range of styles. It seems the path to guitar virtuosity, at least in some ways, has never been more widely available and accessible. We could be heroes …