Talking Guitar: Conversations with Musicians Who Shaped Twentieth-Century American Music

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Guitarchaeology: Setting the Stage

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the guitar was mainly used as a parlor instrument suitable for small-group entertainment and serenading. The instrument was typically found in saloons, pool halls, grange lodges, barbershops, and at church services. Even then, the guitar’s popularity extended across social, class, and gender boundaries.¹ While guitars were readily available through music stores and mail-order catalogs, few recordings of guitar music were available during the first decade of the 1900s, when most players learned from teachers and sheet music.

In rural areas, many young players started out on homemade stringed instruments. The most common of these, the diddley bow, probably originated in Africa. A diddley bow was typically fashioned by attaching broom or baling wire to nails in a wall or doorframe and using bottles or rocks as bridges. One hand plucked the wire, while the other fretted or glissed the string with a bottle. Many outstanding blues guitarists—Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Buddy Guy, and Johnny Winter among them—began this way. Others fashioned primitive guitars by attaching a tin can or cigar box to a rough-hewn neck. Those who could save enough money ordered guitars by mail-order catalog. These guitars, in turn, may offer a clue about how European-influenced parlor music came to exert an influence on the development of American blues, folk, jazz, and country music.

During the latter 1800s, the Lyon & Healy company in Chicago pioneered the mass production of acoustic guitars. By the turn of the century, their many models were sold under various names in catalogs issued by companies such as Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward. Many of these catalog-bought guitars arrived with a tutorial pamphlet featuring tuning instructions and music for rudimentary instrumentals. Two of the most common of these instructive instrumentals, Spanish Fandango and The Siege of Sebastopol, predated the Civil War. The music for Spanish Fandango required that the guitar’s strings be tuned to an open-G chord (the strings tuned DGDGBD, from low to high), while The Siege of Sebastopol was in open D (DADF#AD). Spanish Fandango in particular served as a starting point for countless rural players. Its harmonic content, voice-leading chords, and fingerpicking pattern echoed in the repertoires of old-time blues, folk, and country musicians such as Bo Carter, Son House, Furry Lewis, Frank Hutchison, Sam McGee, John Dilleshaw, Mance Lipscomb, and Elizabeth Cotten. To this day, the word Spanish is sometimes used to describe open-G tuning, while Sebastopol refers to open D.

John Renbourn, the esteemed British fingerstyle guitarist and an expert on the origins of American guitar music, developed a theory of how these instructional booklets contributed to the creation of the blues in particular: If you can imagine a field hand sitting down after work and trying to fit an arhoolie [field song] across the basic chords of ‘Spanish Fandango,’ then you would be close to the moment of transformation, in my opinion. In the early recorded blues of Charley Patton and his school, the harmonic language, right down to specific chord shapes but with bluesy modification usually of one finger only, is straight from parlor music. The same is true for early blues in open D compared to ‘Sebastopol.’ This is fascinating stuff and fairly controversial, but it fills in the missing gap between the steel-string guitar coming into circulation and the highly developed styles that appeared on recordings in the 1920s.² The 1897 Lyon & Healy catalog featured a budget-priced line of steel-string and gut-string guitars. In its 1902 catalog, the Gibson company listed guitars that could be strung with steel or gut strings.

Still, during the first decades of the new century, the banjo was far more popular than the guitar. Since the Civil War, the banjo had been the instrument of choice for solo performers, blackface minstrel troupes, and string bands. With its bright, penetrating sound and lack of sustain, the banjo could hold its own in orchestral settings. The warm, deep resonance of the guitar was better suited for adagios and blues and country songs, and its sustaining notes could be bent or bottlenecked. One fact was inescapable: during the era of the acoustic recording process, when musicians played into recording horns, banjos and mandolins were much easier to record than classical or steel-string guitars. This held true until the mid-1920s, when Western Electric’s innovative new electrical recording process and microphones came into widespread use.

THE FIRST NORTH AMERICAN GUITAR RECORDINGS

The first North American guitar recordings were most likely made in Mexico City in 1904, when singer Rafael Herrera Robinson was accompanied by a guitarist on Edison cylinders. By year’s end, the Victor and Columbia companies had also made forays into Mexico and recorded singers accompanied by guitar. In 1905, the Edison Phonograph Monthly credited An Autumn Evening, a mandolin-guitar instrumental played by Samuel Siegel and M. Lloyd Wolfe, as the first record ever made by this combination of instruments. It is one that, we think, will please all admirers of both instruments. The music is of a serenade character.³

Dick Spottswood, an expert on early recorded music, cites the Edison company’s sessions in Havana, Cuba, during the winter of 1905–1906 as another key event: "Of particular interest are two solos by guitarist Sebastian Hidalgo, who recorded a polka, ‘Selva Negra,’ and the popular ‘Miserere’ from Verdi’s Il Trovatore. Hidalgo’s two Edison cylinders (18941 and 19062) are unknown today; nevertheless, they are most likely the earliest recorded guitar solos, at least in the New World."⁴ In January 1906 the Ossman-Dudley Trio recorded a half-dozen instrumentals for Victor featuring Vess L. Ossman on banjo, Audley Dudley on mandolin, and his brother George N. Dudley on harp guitar; during the ensuing months, the trio recorded three more sides for Columbia.⁵

Octaviano Yañes, promoted by the Edison company as the acknowledged champion guitarist of Mexico, recorded his solo guitar instrumental Habaneras on October 19, 1908.⁶ A copy of this performance survives as a Victor Grand Prize 78. Tim Gracyk, founding editor of the Victrola and 78 Journal, observed that Yañes plays an instrument with at least seven strings. From low to high, it is tuned BEADGBE. Yañes keeps returning to a thunderous, unfretted low-B note, while his low-E notes are also played on an open string. He may have used a seven-string instrument of Mexican or Russian origin (the standard Russian-made import guitar in those days was the seven-string), or a converted eleven-string guitar, many of which had been produced in Andalusia since the 1890s. The bright tone suggests he is playing with his nails very close to the bridge.⁷ While we may never ascertain who made the first solo guitar recording in North America, Hidalgo and Yañes deserve credit for their pioneering efforts. During the next few years, many more cylinders and 78s of guitar-based classical, flamenco, and mariachi music were recorded in Cuba, Mexico, and South America.

The next important influx of guitar cylinders and 78s came via Hawaiian musicians, who made the earliest known recordings of slide guitar. Introduced by missionaries, guitars had been popular in Hawaii since the mid-1800s. The first players of note—Joseph Kekuku, James Hoa, and Gabriel Davion—originally used materials such as bolts, pocketknives, combs, and tumblers to gliss the strings with their fretting hands; eventually they settled on steel bars as the slider of choice. Hawaiian guitarists typically held guitars flat on their laps, strings skyward. This lap-style technique came to be known as steel guitar. Toots Paka’s Hawaiians, a popular turn-of-the-century vaudeville act, recorded Edison cylinders in 1909 with Kekuku on steel guitar. These are the first known recordings of Hawaiian slide guitar.⁸ In an instructional leaflet, Kekuku claimed that he originated the Hawaiian Steel Guitar method of playing in the year 1885, at the age of eleven.⁹

Frank Ferera, the most popular and influential Hawaiian steel guitarist, made more recordings between 1915 and 1925 than any other guitarist. Ferera was the first guitarist to enjoy success as a recording artist, Tim Gracyk explained. His name was a familiar one in the catalogs of virtually all record companies of the World War I era and 1920s. . . . His popular records must have influenced many generations of guitarists.¹⁰ The December 1916 issue of Edison Phonograph Monthly credited Ferera as the one who introduced the Hawaiian-style of playing the guitar into the United States. The issue also described how Ferera had brought the first ukulele to the United States in 1900.¹¹

Hawaiian steel guitar enjoyed a boost in popularity in 1912, thanks to the Broadway sensation The Bird of Paradise, with its weirdly sensual music played by the Hawaiian Quintette. This guitar-and-ukulele ensemble featuring Walter Kolomoku on steel guitar made twenty-four recordings for Victor during April 1913.¹² Three years later, performances by Hawaiian musicians at the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco provided another important catalyst for the mainland’s Hawaiian music craze. The Royal Hawaiian Quartette, with George E. K. Awai front and center on steel guitar, served as the Hawaiian Pavilion’s house band. Guest steelers Pale K. Lua, Frank Ferera, and Joseph Kekuku sat in with the group. More than 17 million people visited the seven-month exhibition, and with several shows per day, the Hawaiian Pavilion was considered a must-see. In our interview, Ry Cooder, one of the finest living proponents of slide guitar, describes the impact of these musicians had at the time.

By 1916, most major record companies offered extensive listings of Hawaiian fare. Hawaiian musicians—particularly duos and trios featuring a steel guitarist—became steady draws in North American hotels, theaters, and especially Chinese restaurants. A headline in the September 1916 issue of Edison Phonograph Monthly proclaimed Hawaiian Music Universally Popular, and described how the style has taken the United States by storm.¹³ Sales of guitars boomed, hundreds of Hawaiian 78s were issued, and music stores displayed Hawaiian-themed sheet music and instructional books. The Hawaiian music fad would continue well into the 1920s, when more advanced guitarists such as Sol Hoopii and King Bennie Nawahi began using metal-bodied National resophonic guitars and flavoring their repertoires with blues, pop, and Tin Pan Alley.

THE ROARING TWENTIES

America’s first popular non-Hawaiian guitarist, Nick Lucas, emerged in 1922 with his recordings of Pickin’ the Guitar and Teasin’ the Frets. Issued as a Pathé 78, these have long been considered the first hot guitar solos recorded in the United States.¹⁴ In our interview, Nick describes how he was able to overcome the limits of recording technology to etch these performances onto wax. Sylvester Weaver, the first blues guitarist on record, doubtlessly used the same technology the following year when he played on Sara Martin’s Longing for Daddy Blues, the first recording of a singer accompanied by blues guitar. A few days later, Weaver featured the steel guitar slide technique on Guitar Rag and Guitar Blues, the first blues instrumentals on record. While he’s lesser-known today than Lucas and Weaver, Sam Moore deserves a standing ovation for his 1921 recording of Laughing Rag. On this jaunty instrumental, Moore seamlessly blended a ragtime progression with hints of Hawaiian and country influences as he played steel guitar on an unusual—and short-lived—eight-string instrument called an octo-chorda.¹⁵ Laughing Rag was covered later by Roy Smeck and recast by Darby and Tarlton, with words, as Mexican Rag.

As the decade progressed, dozens of groundbreaking guitarists emerged in the genres of popular, blues, jazz, and country music. While Nick Lucas was the most widely known of the 1920s guitar stars, among the most stylistically advanced were Eddie Lang, Lonnie Johnson, and Roy Smeck. Lang made his mark as New York’s top studio guitarist, playing expertly on hundreds of records by a who’s who of celebrated bandleaders and singers. Lang popularized the Gibson L-5 archtop, which came out circa 1923, and was the catalyst for a major shift in the rhythm section of jazz bands. George Van Eps, who knew Eddie Lang, explained, "He was a natural talent who made love to his guitar instead of beating it to death, which is what most guitarists tried to do. Banjo players had to switch to the guitar after hearing Eddie. There were a bunch of die-hards who tuned the guitar like a banjo, but he forced the issue and changed the sound of the rhythm section."¹⁶ Lonnie Johnson, who often recorded with a twelve-string, worked his magic in the areas of urbane blues and jazz, becoming, as Ry Cooder so aptly put it, "one of the transcendental people who influenced everybody. You can see people copying him right and left.¹⁷ By a stroke of genius, T. J. Rockwell, an artist manager at OKeh Records, arranged for Lang, who had a profound understanding of harmony, and Johnson, who had the finest technique in blues, to record a series of groundbreaking guitar duets. These records still stand as high-water marks of jazz guitar. Roy Smeck, who idolized Lang, performed in vaudeville as the Wizard of the Strings." Smeck’s uncanny skill on guitar, banjo, steel guitar, and ukulele was on full display on dozens of 78s and two of the earliest sound-on-film theatrical releases.

Beginning in the mid-1920s Paramount Records was responsible for many enduring blues guitar recordings, such as those of Texas country bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake, the Southeast’s master of ragtime-influenced fingerpicking. Tampa Red, the superlative Chicago slider, worked his magic for Vocalion Records. The OKeh Records roster included Lonnie Johnson, Sylvester Weaver, and songster Mississippi John Hurt, who’d reemerge in the 1960s, his considerable skills intact. Columbia Records issued Blind Willie Johnson’s sublime slide-driven gospel 78s. Blind Willie McTell, one of the finest bluesman of any era, recorded for Victor, Columbia, OKeh, Decca, Vocalion, and the Library of Congress. In the years before World War II, many regions of the South—especially those around Atlanta, Georgia; Dallas, Texas; Memphis, Tennessee; and the Mississippi Delta—had their own distinctive blues styles.¹⁸

Many white country artists emerged during the 1920s. Two acts who’d exert an enduring influence on country guitar—Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family—were discovered in 1927, when Ralph Peer, a Victor and former OKeh executive, made a series of field recordings in Bristol, Tennessee. The guitar-strumming Rodgers, the foremost country star of the Roaring Twenties, recorded the earliest versions of several country-music standards, as well as memorable 12-bar blues such as 1929’s Blue Yodel No. 5 and Jimmie’s Texas Blues. In 1930, the Weymann company introduced the Jimmie Rodgers Special model, making Rodgers the first country musician to have a guitar named after him. The Carter Family, with Maybelle Carter on guitar, helped carry traditional American folk music into the mainstream. Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, Earl Scruggs, and many others cited her as a primary influence on their style.¹⁹

Riley Puckett, old-time country music’s foremost guitarist, was best known for his ensemble work with Georgia’s most famous string band, Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers. On his 1927 solo recording A Darkey’s Wail, Puckett crossed over into bottleneck country blues. Other early country guitarists likewise drew from blues influences. Frank Hutchison, who’d learned his style directly from African-American musicians in rural West Virginia, had a loose, slightly inexact slide technique that surely would have sounded familiar to people used to hearing Southern street musicians. Other standout examples include Sam McGee’s Railroad Blues, a tour de force of sophisticated fingerpicking and string bending, and Dick Justice’s decidedly down-home Brownskin Blues. The duo of Tom Darby and Jimmie Tarlton made many fine slide guitar recordings and scored one of the decade’s biggest country hits with Columbus Stockade Blues. In the long run, the white country blues recorded during the 1920s by musicians such as Jimmie Rodgers, Frank Hutchison, the Carter Family, the Allen Brothers, Sam McGee, Darby and Tarlton, and others deserve credit for helping to inaugurate racial and stylistic integration in the blues, a trend that continues to this day. By decade’s end, guitar-strumming singing cowboys such as Carl T. Sprague and Gene Autry had also issued hit recordings.

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 devastated many American businesses. The recording industry provided no exception, especially in the field of blues records. Paramount Records, for instance, was still going strong when it held its legendary May 1930 session with Mississippi Delta blues musicians Charley Patton, Son House, Willie Brown, and Louise Johnson. By 1932, the company had ceased its recording activities, and three years later shuttered its doors. Blues artists on larger labels were impacted as well. In 1929, for instance, Columbia Records pressed 2,205 copies of Blind Willie McTell’s Travelin’ Blues / Come on Around to My House Mama, followed by a second run of 2,000.²⁰ Three years later, McTell’s new Victor 78 of Lonesome Day Blues / Searching the Desert for the Blues sold only 124 copies.²¹ Sales of white hillbilly artists tended to be stronger, but as the Depression deepened, artists across the board were affected. As Dick Spottswood noted, The years from 1930 to 1934 were the worst in the short history of sound recording. No company besides Victor emerged intact from those years.²²

THE BIRTH OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR

On the guitar innovation front, by contrast, the early 1930s proved to be a watershed. The acoustic instrument’s lack of volume had plagued guitarists since the cylinder era. The introduction of resonator guitars by National and Dobro in the 1920s helped guitarists conjure a louder sound, as did the new larger-bodied f-hole archtops offered by Gibson and Epiphone and the Martin company’s dreadnought models of the early 1930s. But unless used for comping, these all-acoustic guitars still had difficulty being heard alongside other instruments on a bandstand. That would all change with the invention of the electric pickup.

Music instrument manufacturers had primarily focused their early efforts on electrically amplifying violins and keyboards. Then, in its October 20, 1928, issue, Music Trade Review reported that the Stromberg-Voisinet company, the forerunner of the Kay guitar company, had developed a method for electromagnetically amplifying a guitar: The tone amplifier is electrically operated, either by alternating or direct current. It consists of two major units—an electro-magnetic pick-up and an amplifying unit. The electro-magnetic pick-up is built within the instrument and is attached to its sounding board. The unit is connected with the amplifier, which produces the tone volume required of the instrument.²³ Lynn Wheelwright, an expert on the earliest electric guitars, clarifies that this electromagnetic pickup was most likely the driver for a speaker. It used a metal reed, which vibrated within the magnetic field and was driven by a rod attached to the soundboard.²⁴ The following year, Stromberg-Voisinet ran an advertisement depicting a pair of electric flat-top guitars alongside a pair of electric banjos.²⁵ These guitars, however, were not a commercial success.

The electric guitar revolution began in earnest in October 1931 with the founding of the Los Angeles–based Ro-Pat-In Corporation, the first company devoted entirely to the production of electric instruments. George Beauchamp, the company’s cofounder, designed a pickup that consisted of six magnetically energized pole pieces—one for each string—surrounded by a wire coil that, in turn, was surrounded by a pair of horseshoe-shaped magnets. In concept, wrote guitar historian Walter Carter, it was the modern electric guitar pickup.²⁶ In 1932 Ro-Pat-In applied its new technology to the first solidbody electric guitar, a Hawaiian steel nicknamed the Frying Pan due to its odd shape, which resembled a frying pan with a round body and long, handle-like neck. The prototype Frying Pan was made of wood, but the production models, introduced in the fall of 1932, were cast aluminum. A grand total of thirteen Frying Pans were sold in 1932, Carter detailed. Ro-Pat-In also introduced a Spanish-neck, f-hole model with a wood body supplied by the Harmony company of Chicago, and four of these models were sold in 1932.²⁷ (During this era, the term Spanish-neck guitar referred to a standard-shaped guitar played the standard way.) The following year Ro-Pat-In changed its name to Electro String Instrument Company and created the Richenbacher Electro badge that began appearing on its pegheads. Today the company is known as Rickenbacker.

By mid-1932 the Vivi-Tone company also began producing standard-shaped electrically amplifiable flat-top guitars. Unlike the Ro-Pat-In model, ViVi-Tone’s earliest electric guitar was a plank model. It had a 3/16-inch thick ply top, Lynn Wheelwright detailed, supported by a heavy wood spine and no back or sides. By the end of 1932 ViVi had built around a hundred of these in various configurations, including violins, mandolins, mandocellos, and four- and six-string guitars. These skeletal-looking instruments were available by mid-1932, and the ViVi-Tone archtops by spring 1933. ViVi-Tone’s total production reached about six-hundred instruments, the majority being electric.²⁸ Despite its innovative nature, ViVi-Tone was not commercially successful, and the company folded in 1936. Wheelwright explained: I suspect that the problem with the ViVi-Tones was they would come out of adjustment easily when dropped or banged around, causing the vibration-transfer pickup to misalign and stop working properly.²⁹

Soon other companies were offering electric guitars. In 1932 National and Dobro merged to become National-Dobro. Wheelwright’s research into recently discovered company letters and advertisements confirms that the new company had a working electric guitar by late 1933: This was essentially a solidbody that used direct string vibration over an electromagnetic humbucking pickup. Considering the number of survivors, they had decent production. National-Dobro also launched a line of high-quality ES archtops by mid 1935.³⁰ By late 1935, three other prominent companies had entered the electric-guitar market. Gibson’s first pickup-equipped guitar, a small metal-body EH—for Electric Hawaiian—was a steel guitar in the shape of a standard guitar, while Epiphone’s Electar steel had more of a teardrop body shape. Epiphone also came out with the first of its Spanish-style electric archtops, while the Regal company’s first electric Spanish guitar, as Wheelwright described, was, for all purposes, a solidbody with no sound holes, a heavily braced 3/8-inch laminated top, and a twelve-pole humbucking pickup. It sounded incredible and had no obnoxious 60-cycle hum.³¹

In 1936 Gibson introduced the pre-war era’s most successful electric guitar, the ES-150; the ES designation indicated Electric Spanish, while the 150 referred to its original price of $150, including the amplifier. This instrument, and the pricier ES-250, were popularized by Charlie Christian during his celebrated stint with the Benny Goodman Sextet and Orchestra. Still, during the 1930s sales of steel guitars far outstripped those of Electric-Spanish models. According to Lynn Wheelwright, Rickenbacker made only a handful of ES guitars, but probably over a thousand EH units. The same was true of Gibson, Epiphone, and National-Dobro, but not to such an unbalanced extent. There were large Hawaiian guitar clubs all over the country.³² Around 1938, the Slingerland company of Chicago began offering its Spanish-neck Songster model, which George Gruhn and Walter Carter cite as the first production solidbody model from any maker prior to World War II that comes close to postwar solidbody standards.³³

THE PLAYERS ADAPT

While Alvino Rey’s name is not widely known today, in the 1930s he was at the forefront of promoting the electric guitar. Lynn Wheelwright, who now owns Charlie Christian’s ES-250, worked as Rey’s guitar tech for many years. Alvino is best known for his ‘talking guitar’ and as the father of the pedal steel, he explained, but he was so much more. He should be known as the ‘Godfather of the Electric Guitar.’ He was a very early advocate of the technology. He was playing electric banjo with Phil Spitalny’s Orchestra in New York in late 1928. By October 1932 he had one of the first Frying Pans, which he put to use on his twice-daily radio show out of San Francisco. He also used his Vivi-Tone electric, plugging it straight into the radio station’s console. He was the first electric guitar player on coast-to-coast radio. I would credit Alvino with putting this newfangled electric gadget, which at the time was considered an expensive parlor trick, into use and into the ears of the public. He made it acceptable and proved to other musicians as well as bandleaders that it had a legitimate place on the bandstand. Alvino was the most important electric guitar player of the early- to mid-1930s. When Gibson was looking to get into the electric market, they enlisted Alvino’s help in May 1935. He was the first official electric guitar endorser for any company and one of the highest paid front men for any band—and all with an electric guitar.³⁴

Soon after its introduction, the electric Hawaiian guitar made its debut on record. Dick Spottswood detailed, The earliest known recordings of an electrically amplified guitar were made for Victor by Noelani’s Hawaiian Orchestra.³⁵ Their initial session, which took place in New York City on February 22, 1933, produced six sides. On a few of the songs Noelani Lopez (or Lopes, as her name was sometimes spelled) sang lead vocals to the accompaniment of guitar, banjo-guitar, ukulele, and electric steel guitar. Joseph Lopez, who’d been performing on steel guitar since at least the mid-1920s, was credited as the composer of the session’s final selection, the steel guitar solo Hawaiian Love-Waltz, which suggests that he may have been the steeler on these historic recordings. A subsequent Victor 78 of Hawaiian Love-Waltz, by the Hilo Hawaiian Orchestra, spelled his last name Lopes in the songwriter credit, so perhaps he was related to Noelani. In September 1933, Noelani’s Hawaiian Orchestra made additional records featuring an electrified Hawaiian steel guitar. By 1934 other Hawaiian musicians—notably Andy Iona and His Islanders and Sol Hoopii—were using electrified steel guitars.

In 1935, the first western swing records featuring electric guitars hit the market. That January, Milton Brown’s Musical Brownies made stellar recordings with Bob Dunn’s electrified slide guitar prominently featured in the mix. In his youth, Dunn had seen a Hawaiian group performing in Oklahoma, and he’d subscribed to Walter Kolomoku’s correspondence lessons.³⁶ His instrument at the Musical Brownies sessions was a heavily modified round-hole acoustic. The Martin O-series model acoustic he cradled in his lap was anything but typical, wrote country music historian Rich Kienzle. A Volo-Tone pickup was mounted over the soundhole, and a wire ran from the pickup to a small, nondescript amplifier. The Martin’s strings had been raised to permit Hawaiian-style playing. Among the songs he used it on that day were ‘Chinatown, My Chinatown,’ ‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’ ‘St. Louis Blues,’ and his own composition, ‘Taking Off,’ which has since become a western swing standard.³⁷ On September 23–25, 1935, Leon McAuliffe, a brilliant player from Tulsa, Oklahoma, whose phrasing could well have influenced Charlie Christian, featured both electric steel and electrically amplified Spanish guitar on the first recordings by Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys. Three days after the Wills session ended, Jim Boyd also used an electrically amplified Spanish guitar while recording Hot Dog Stomp with his brother’s band, Bill Boyd’s Cowboy Ramblers.³⁸ From then on, electrically amplified guitars played an integral role in western swing music.

Alvino Rey, The Godfather of the Electric Guitar, helped popularize the instrument during the 1930s. (Courtesy Lynn Wheelwright Collection)

On the jazz front, Eddie Durham is a contender for being the first to record an electrically amplified solo. A skilled arranger who doubled on trombone, Durham began experimenting with acoustically amplifying a standard guitar while a member of Bennie Moten’s band in the 1920s. To compete with the volume of Moten’s horn players, who occasionally soloed through megaphones, Durham first used a radically modified instrument: I got one of those tin pie pans and carved out my acoustic guitar’s top and put it down in there, he explained. It was the size of a breakfast plate. When you’d hit those strings, the pie pan would ring and shoot out the sound. I’d also use a megaphone with it. I didn’t have that for too long, though, because I got a National steel guitar. It had a resonator in it, and it was usually played with a bar. I removed the bridge and put an acoustic-type bridge on it so the action was lower. I fooled around with that for a long time, and nobody else was playing a guitar like that back then. The neck was too thick, though. There was no such thing as two microphones in bands; they only had one. I used to let them stick the mike near the resonator and I’d be just as loud as anything else. I wouldn’t do rhythm, though—no way. I did solo work.³⁹

In early 1935 Eddie Durham joined Jimmie Lunceford and His Orchestra. At first, he recalled, I went back to using a wooden guitar. I used to let Lunceford put the microphone up to the f-hole. Then later on DeArmond came out with a pickup, which I got, but they didn’t have sound amplifiers. So I’d get any kind of amp I could find and sit it on the corner of the stage and run a cord to the guitar, and that was it. And if we were playing in a big auditorium, I’d go directly into the sound system. You couldn’t play rhythm like that because it was too loud. I used to blow out the lights in a lot of places; they really weren’t up on electricity like they are now. I’d just play solo work, and I think that at that time I was the only guy playing that kind of guitar in a jazz band.⁴⁰ While Leonard Feather and other jazz historians have cited Lunceford’s September 30, 1935, recording of Hittin’ the Bottle as the first jazz recording to feature an electrically amplified guitar, aural evidence suggests it could have been done with a resonator guitar. There’s no doubt, though, that Durham used an electric guitar to solo on Count Basie and His Orchestra’s August 9, 1937, recording of Time Out, as well as for his 1938 discs with the Kansas City Six.⁴¹ During this time, Durham was photographed with a National electric guitar.

Other early electric guitarists encountered problems onstage. Eldon Shamblin, who played alongside Leon McAuliffe in Bob Wills’s band, recalled his 1938 effort to electrify his archtop: We had a man right here in Tulsa, Bob Ridley, build an amplifier, and I used a little crystal mike on my Gibson Super 400. I had to cut a notch in my bridge to slide that little crystal mike under. This was the most horrible thing that you ever heard in your life! This would nearly make a man go commit suicide. One night you’d play it, your E string would be hotter than a pistol, and you couldn’t hear your B or G [strings]. The next night maybe your B was hot, and the others wouldn’t sound. I think about that point Gibson came out with an amplified guitar. I had a Gibson guitar and a Gibson amplifier. I don’t remember what model it was, but it was one of the first ones to come out. It wasn’t very good, really.⁴²

On the blues front, the vast majority of 1930s recordings featured acoustic guitar. A few performers, notably Blind Willie McTell and Lead Belly, preferred twelve-string guitars, while their counterparts in the Mississippi Delta and other regions favored six-string instruments. The first person to play an electric guitar on a blues record was probably a white, sixteen-year-old studio musician in Chicago, George Barnes. On March 1, 1938, Barnes backed Big Bill Broonzy, a fine guitarist in his own right, on Sweetheart Land and It’s a Low Down Dirty Shame. Immediately afterward, he accompanied Curtis Jones singing the same two songs. Barnes highlighted his sophisticated performances with unusual string bends. Within a few weeks, he had also played electric guitar on sessions with Hattie Bolton, Blind John Davis, Jazz Gillum, Merline Johnson, and others. On October 18, 1938, Lonnie Johnson, who Barnes credited with teaching him how to play blues guitar, used an electric guitar for the first time during a Peetie Wheatstraw session. Tampa Red began recording with an electric guitar that December, followed by Big Bill Broonzy in July 1939. In 1941, Memphis Minnie became the first woman to play electric guitar on blues records.

It would take Charlie Christian, an extraordinary twenty-three-year-old from Oklahoma City, to demonstrate the full potential of the electric guitar in a jazz setting. In 1939 Columbia Records producer John Hammond arranged for Christian to audition for Benny Goodman. At this time, in Hammond’s estimation, there were essentially two electric guitarists in jazz: One was Leonard Ware in New York. I had him on my third Spirituals to Swing concert, in 1938, but unfortunately the machine in which he recorded had a ‘wow’ in it, so we were never able to put those things out. He was very good, but he was not in Charlie’s class. Charlie was an original. There’s never been anybody like Charlie on the guitar. He was a complete revolutionary. The other jazz guitar player was Floyd Smith, but he played a Hawaiian guitar, you know. And Hawaiian guitar is bad enough, but amplified, it was excruciating!⁴³ Ware, who didn’t do much recording, used an electric guitar on several 78s cut with Sidney Bechet and His Orchestra in November 1938. Floyd Smith made his mark in jazz history on March 6, 1939, when he recorded Floyd’s Guitar Blues, played on slide guitar, while a member of Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy. Leonard Feather wrote of the release, A minor sensation, it was the trigger for the whole fusillade of new guitar styles to be issued only months later by Charlie Christian’s arrival in New York. With the advent of Christian, the guitar came of age in jazz.⁴⁴

Christian’s solos on 78s and radio broadcasts with the Benny Goodman Sextet and Orchestra rapidly made him the best-known electric guitarist in jazz. Players across the country studied his solos and longed for guitars like his Gibson ES-150 and ES-250. Forty years after Christian’s death in 1941, Benny Goodman still had unabashed enthusiasm for his former bandmate: He was unique! A brilliant musician. Inventive. He was way ahead of his time, and a joy to listen to. He was rather shy, but by gosh, when he sat down and played the guitar, he was something! He was an amazing player to listen to. He contributed a great deal to jazz, and a lot of people were influenced by him, including me.⁴⁵ And, as leading Christian disciple Barney Kessel says in our interview, The music Charlie made changed the world.

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Nick Lucas: America’s First Guitar Hero

During the Roaring Twenties, Nick Lucas and the steel-string guitar seemed nearly inseparable. By July 1922, Nick had already secured his place in music history by waxing the first hot guitar solos released in the United States, Pickin’ the Guitar and Teasin’ the Frets, both of which he composed. Framing his warm, pure tenor with agile guitar parts, Lucas scored his first major hit two years later, My Best Girl. With his many recordings and frequent radio appearances, this warm, effervescent Italian-American helped introduce a generation of listeners to the sound of a beautifully played flat-picked acoustic guitar. Lucas went on to win rave reviews on Broadway, give command performances to European royalty, and costar in the 1929 Technicolor film Gold Diggers of Broadway. In one of the film’s highlights, Lucas crooned the biggest hit of his career, Tip-Toe Thru the Tulips with Me, accompanying himself on his ornate Gibson Nick Lucas Special, the first artist-endorsed guitar. By then The Crooning Troubadour was America’s most famous guitarist. His smiling, tuxedo-clad image adorned stacks of sheet music and guitar instruction books. Music stores featured displays of Nick Lucas guitar picks, which were offered in a wide variety of materials and styles for decades to come.

As Nick’s influence and popularity were eclipsed by others—Eddie Lang, Django Reinhardt, and Charlie Christian among them—he soldiered on, making records and playing nightclubs. He was featured in several 1930s Vitaphone shorts, and during World War II starred in four Soundies, which were the forerunners of MTV-era music videos. His later years found him gigging in casinos, playing conventions, and appearing on television. When pop sensation Tiny Tim married Miss Vicki on the Tonight Show—to an audience of 40 million—Nick was there, performing Tip-Toe Thru the Tulips in the background.

In the late 1970s, I learned that Nick Lucas was alive and well, living in semiretirement at The Fontenoy apartments on North Whitley in Hollywood. From his sixth-floor apartment windows, he could watch guitar-carrying students make their way to the nearby Guitar Institute of Technology, unaware that they were walking past the man who laid the groundwork for everyone from Eddie Lang and Charlie Christian to Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani, and Steve Vai. Nick was happy to receive my telephone call and quickly agreed to do an interview. Our conversation took place on September 3, 1980. Early on, I asked Nick about how guitar recordings were made during the era of wax masters and the big recording horn.

Are you up for doing an interview now?

Oh, sure. I’m ready to go.

I hope you don’t mind going back in your career a little bit.

Well, all you gotta do is ask questions. Everything you have in mind, why, I’ll be glad to answer ’em. How far back do you want to go?

To about 1906, with your brother Frank.

[Laughs.] Yeah!

Learning mandolin?

Yeah. 1906 was just about the time. I was in grammar school; I was just about eight, nine years old. First of all, before I started with my brother Frank, he wanted me to study music without an instrument—solfeggio, which I studied from a Sicilian maestro, they called them in those days. That’s all they did is teach music without an instrument. They taught the fundamentals of the music, of timing, and things like that. I studied that for about a year, and then he put me on the mandolin, because in those days mandolin was the dominant instrument with the Italians and with the general public. Of course, it wasn’t a commercial instrument; it was mostly for house entertainment—playing weddings and christenings and things like that. This was in Newark, New Jersey. That’s where I was born.

Was your name originally Nick Lucas?

No, my original name was Dominic. My baptismal name was Dominic Nicholas Antonio Lucanese. That’s an Italian name. Antonio was taken after some of my relatives; I guess they always like to include them. So actually I had four names. My first name was Dominic, I understand, due to the fact that I was born on a Sunday. Domenica means Sunday in Italian.

So after that, after I had a little knowledge of the fundamentals of music, he put me on the mandolin. My brother Frank was a very versatile musician. He was a thorough musician. He played the accordion, and in those days the accordion was it. It was a very, very popular instrument. And he wanted me to play the mandolin so that I could go with him on different occasions. I played weddings and christenings, because we did come from a very, very poor family. In those days, money was scarce and the wages were very poor. However, the living in those days was very, very inexpensive also, so there was no problem there.