“Guitar fever” swept America in the 1830s, setting into motion a chain of events that would transform American music and culture. Initially embraced as a parlor instrument by the burgeoning middle class of Jacksonian America, by the end of the century the guitar had become the instrument of choice for a new breed of musician shaping the future of American music in the music halls and honky-tonks of African-American neighborhoods and urban tenderloin districts. By the mid-twentieth century, the guitar had claimed a nearly unassailable position as the dominant musical instrument of American popular culture.

Much has been written about the guitar and its players since the 1920s, the decade when rural bluesmen and “hillbilly” string bands were first recorded.  Many guitar fans, as well as some writers and scholars, assume that prior to that time the guitar either was a folk instrument played principally by cowboys, Appalachian mountain men and itinerant black songsters, or was a trivial diversion for Victorian parlor musicians. These assumptions are not entirely wrong, but they represent only a small part of a compelling and important story. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the birth of American music, from minstrel shows to spirituals, to ragtime, jazz and the blues. By the end of World War I – before most books about American guitars and guitarists pick up the story in earnest – the cultural juggernaut that would dominate the world’s popular music and drive the guitar to unprecedented levels of popularity in the mid-twentieth century had been unleashed.

The “mold of myth,” according to frontier historian Elliott Coues, quickly gathers around “a neglected core of fact.” The guitar’s role in the birth and growth of American popular music has been subjected to creative conjecture, hopeful hypothesizing and a misremembered past. In the process, the instrument has become more an object of myth than a subject of historical analysis. The goal of this project is to scrape away the mold of myth that has grown up around the neglected core of fact about the guitar’s role in American music. By doing so, we can better understand the forces that have shaped modern American music and have made the guitar the defining voice of that music.

Let's start scraping.

Copyright 2009, David K. Bradford