Early Days of the Electric Guitar
The Instrument Emerges
Prior to Fender’s introduction of a mass-market guitar amplifier in 1946,
the guitar was most prominently utilized as a percussive instrument in jazz
big band, the most prominent of which were the Count Basie Orchestra and
their guitarist, Freddie Green. However, early instances of amplified or
‘electric guitar’ date back to the 1930s, as typified by seminal jazz guitarist,
Charlie Christian. In Christian’s era, there were two primary barriers between
mass-market access to an amplified version of the electric guitar:
● Lack of an affordable mass-production option, which was developed by
Leo Fender in 1949. However, the Electro String company and Dobro both
introduced production model versions of a guitar amplifier in the
mid-30s.
● The early archtop models, which were preferred by most jazz guitarists at
the time, generated an unmanageable amount of feedback when
amplified at a volume that would allow for the guitar to be considered a
‘lead’ instrument outside of the small jazz ensemble.
Due to these limitations, pop music going into the 1950s was composed
largely of vocal ensembles dressed in matching suit and tie attire and/or
dance bands featuring an updated take on vocal music from the big band
era, with any ‘lead’ instrumental responsibilities being relegated largely to
the saxophone.
However, it is worth noting that vocal recordings originating from the
blues and gospel communities continued more or less unchanged from the
late 1930s to the early 1950s despite the introduction of the electric guitar,
making early recordings by BB King and Sister Rosetta Tharpe among the
first and arguably most important contributions to both the language of the
electric instrument and the practice of recording it to tape.
Two innovations in the mid-1950s set the electric guitar on its path
toward revolutionizing the recording industry and reshaping pop culture into
something that looks a bit more familiar in the process:
● In 1952, Les Paul and Mary Ford introduced a ‘solid body’ guitar to the
Gibson manufacturing line; the instrument was designed as a more
durable, feedback-free alternative to jazz guitarists with two humbucking
(grounded) pickps; however, the instrument didn’t catch on with its
intended demographic and is now known as the ‘gold top’ Les Paul
favored by many of rock music’s most iconic guitarists.
● In 1958, Leo Fender introduced the Jazzmaster, a competing solid body
instrument with P-90 (single coil, ungrounded) pickups and a variety of
tone knobs and switches designed to give the player a wide variety of
tonal possibilities in a single instrument.
Similar to the Gibson Les Paul, the Jazzmaster failed to catch on among
jazz guitarists as its tone was too far removed from the warm, woody sound
of most archtop guitars. The instrument also had a few major drawbacks,
largely that it was time-consuming to manufacture and therefore not a
financially feasible purchase for most aspiring rock and pop guitarists, who
happened to be largely still in high school at the time. As a result, the
Jazzmaster was eventually replaced by the Stratocaster and Telecaster,
which were originally intended to be budget or ‘gateway’ models to the more
complex version of the instrument.
There are a number of modern-day guitarists who prefer the Jazzmaster
and its offshoots, the Jaguar and the Mustang, to their more popular cousins.
The most prominent of these is arguably Kurt Cobain, who preferred a
Jaguar/Mustang hybrid inelegantly nicknamed the ‘Jagtang’. Other
contemporary proponents of the Jazzmaster family are J. Mascis of the band
Dinosaur Jr. and AJ Haynes of the band Seratones.
Pop Culture and Pop Recording in the 1950s
The emergence of the solid-body electric guitar into pop culture had
two primary impacts on the recording industry:
● Resolving the feedback issue made it possible for the guitar to compete
with the saxophone, eventually replacing it in most pop ensemble
settings as the ‘lead’ instrument of choice
● Due to the technical limitations of recording at the time, most recordings
in any genre were recorded in one continuous mono or stereo take. The
presence of the electric guitar in the recording environment presented
some challenges for recording vocal music, briefly launching
‘instrumental rock’ into the consciousness of most American teens.
At this time, awareness of new music generally happened via radio
broadcast or live music segments on national TV. However, as rock, pop and
soul music began to infect the imaginations of most American youth, live
music became a primary focus for social gatherings across the nation. These
‘teen dances’, as they were called at the time, were the beginnings of the DIY
youth culture that has been the core driving force behind the music industry
since the mid-1950s. As the PA systems of the era were both cumbersome
and expensive, guitar amplifiers often doubled for a PA in these youth-driven
social settings. Instrumental music by groups like the Ventures, the
Fendermen and Link Wray and his Wraymen dominated the airwaves until the
practice of multitrack recording caught on. When the Beatles and The Rolling
Stones made their first in-person appearances in the United States in 1964,
the cultural revolution that came with them effectively wiped instrumental
rock and roll movement out of popular consciousness.
