Instruments
Guitar
The acoustic guitar, distinguished from other lute-type instruments by its characteristic combination of flat-backed resonating chamber, fretted neck, and indented side walls, is of great antiquity; terminologically and perhaps historically it is related to the Greek kithara lyre. Repertory directly associated with the classical guitar began to appear early in the Renaissance era, although the modern instrument with six strings dates only from the late eighteenth century. The earliest six-string guitars seem to have been made in France or Italy, but soon it became associated above all with Spain, where to this day there flourishes a unique tradition of classical guitar music, marked by strong quasi-improvisatory elements and a variety of exotic influences. Spain is also the home of the fiery, gypsy-created guitar style known as flamenco. How did the guitar become beloved above all other instruments among modern amateur musicians, and how did it assume its preeminent position in the world of popular song? Certainly it is ideally suited to such roles in many ways: it is inexpensive, portable, easily learned at the basic level, and capable of producing both melody and rhythm. Nevertheless, it is difficult to point to a single seed from which the guitar's popularity grew. Its route into American musical consciousness took it through Hawaii, where it was introduced by Portuguese sailors in the nineteenth century and where it gave birth to an enormous craze for Hawaiian music whose scope in the early twentieth century is often underestimated today. The guitar was popular among both country and blues musicians, and probably the first musical figure to embody the image of a solitary, freewheeling musical creator making a living by accompanying his own songs with a guitar was the "Blue Yodeler" who most profoundly combined the two genres, Jimmie Rodgers. In modern parlance the word "guitar" usually connotes an electric guitar; the qualifier "acoustic" is necessary to indicate the original instrument. The first electric guitars were marketed by the Rickenbacker, National, and Gibson companies in the 1930s. These were essentially acoustic instruments with pickups for an amplifier, and like other electric instruments they gained their first popularity in the country and rhythm-and-blues fields, where nightclub and tavern venues were the rule and added volume was required. The first solid-body electric guitar, with entirely electronic amplification, was built for country guitarist Merle Travis around 1946; shortly after that, the Fender company's Broadcaster model, soon renamed the Telecaster, set the pattern for numerous instruments that followed, and did as much as any other single invention to give birth to rock and roll. Over much of the rest of the twentieth century the guitar was the point of intersection between the efforts of individual players and the vast array of musical electronics involved in the composition of a popular recording.