There’s something deeply compelling about the look, the feel and the sound of an acoustic guitar. It might come from hearing notes and chords ring out as its strings are played; it might emerge from the contemplation that comes from holding the instrument in your hands and making it sing.
There’s more to the acoustic guitar than the sounds its produces, however — there’s also a complicated, fascinating history. In the book The Devil Is in It: A History of the American Acoustic Guitar, guitar collector John Stubbings chronicled both the personal appeal and the complex lineage of this ubiquous musical instrument. This new edition of The Devil Is In It follows an earlier limited-edition version, building on its predecessor to answer even more questions about all things acoustic.
In this excerpt, Stubbings traces the origins of his own enthusiasm for acoustic guitars — and explores some of the geography they’ve traveled along the way.
Waiting for the delivery of two new handcrafted guitars, at the time my fourteenth and fifteenth, I could not disguise my excitement. But, as pleased as I was, I knew the pair were evidence that I had contracted an extreme and unreasonable enthusiasm for guitar acquisition.
Before I inevitably acquired more, I needed to understand how this had happened. How had the eighteenth-century European classical or Spanish guitar been transformed by the twentieth century into the modern American steel-string flat-top that had taken such a hold of me? I needed to better comprehend the allure, power, and influence of this once little-respected instrument that reshaped twentieth-century music. How had it become the defining instrument of our age, democratizing music making over a dozen decades and influencing not just music but social politics and popular culture?
Like many guitar enthusiasts and “accidental collectors,” I knew some of the history of the guitar. But I wanted to connect the dots, see what links the European classical guitars that arrived in America in the nineteenth century to today’s ubiquitous American flat-top dreadnought that every teenager uses to play their versions of Taylor Swift’s “Tim McGraw” or Ed Sheeran’s “The A Team.”
How, and why, did the physical shape, design, and size of the guitar evolve? What influences caused the small-bodied parlor guitar of the mid-nineteenth century to morph into the single, double, and triple 0s, via the OM, into the relatively gargantuan dreadnought and jumbo and ultimately into the modern modified dreadnought?
In search of more answers, I read extensively around the topic: books about guitars and their history; academic papers; and interviews with guitar players, makers, collectors, and dealers. I also disappeared down the various rabbit holes of the World Wide Web. As I dug deeper and ever wider, a friend suggested I should follow the flat-top guitar’s own journey from Europe to America.
That journey and the people I met along the way helped me better understand the history behind the defining instrument of our age. As I travelled from New York to Pennsylvania, through the Carolinas into Tennessee and Mississippi, south to Texas and on to the Mexican border, and then looped up through Northern California, I began to appreciate how the guitar had superseded the banjo, violin, mandolin, and ukulele, all of which had been much more popular at one time.
I also learned why so much of the music we love today was inspired and facilitated by the acoustic guitar—and how so much of the music we listen to today not only came from the poorest sections of America’s Black and white communities but also was inspired and facilitated by the steel-string flat-top acoustic guitar. The people’s instrument.
I was driving south on Highway 61, a route that originally started at the Canada-US border and ran for 1,714 miles south to New Orleans. In Minnesota it runs through Duluth, where Bob Dylan was born. In Mississippi it passes by the birth- and workplaces of Muddy Waters, Charley Patton,
Son House, and Elvis Presley. Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues,” died in 1937 on Highway 61 just outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, where her speeding car sideswiped a truck. The doctor who attended her as she lay dying in the middle of the two-lane blacktop reckoned she had lost a lot of blood. She died beside a road that had been built mostly by the labor of Black chain gangs that were leased to highway departments by state prisons.
Highway 61 is steeped in the blood, sweat, and tears of the blues. As a teenager living in England, over five thousand miles from Highway 61, I had no reason to know of its existence or much about it. Yet I did.
When I was in my mid-teens, the English folk singer Shirley Collins visited our high school art class. Our teacher, Mike Clifton, had sung on and created the cover art for her then-most-recent album, Anthems in Eden (1969). We sat and listened to a few tracks, and afterward she talked about how a decade earlier, in 1959, when she was only a little older than us, she had visited Mississippi with the American song collector Alan Lomax. She told us how she first saw the Black blues singer Mississippi Fred McDowell. I’m sure none of us at the time had any idea who he was or why Mississippi was of any significance, but she was an entertaining storyteller. Many years later, on a BBC Radio interview, she told the same story she had told us in 1970. What she had seen more than sixty years earlier had clearly moved her and remained lodged in her memory.
He appeared through the trees wearing his work overalls and carrying his guitar He’d been picking cotton all day and came into the clearing where the shacks were [,] sat down, and “61 Highway Blues” was the first thing that he played. And it was the most wonderful sound. That shimmering metallic sound of the guitar, his wonderful voice, and the wonderful blues itself. It was so extraordinary, and Alan and I were just looking at each other and shaking our heads in wonder. Alan wrote one word in his notebook, which he’d never written before. “Perfect.”
Lord that 61 Highway. It the longest road I know.
Four weeks into my American road trip, I arrived at the crossroads where Highway 61 meets old Highway 49—not just any old road junction but the one where Robert Johnson made his Faustian pact with the Devil when he traded his soul for mastery of the guitar.
I had finally reached Clarksdale, home of the blues. W. C. Handy had lived there in 1903 and regularly played with his band, not just in the town’s swanky uptown restaurants but in the less salubrious saloons and boogie-woogie joints of the area.
After many weeks and hundreds of miles of solitary travelling, I had begun to better understand the guitar’s strange energy to induce addiction and obsession among guitarists and guitar-builders alike. I also realized that in America the acoustic guitar was much more than a musical instrument. It doesn’t just provide a musical accompaniment to the social and political history of the United States; it is at its heart.
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With the release of his new triple album “Twilight Override,” the songwriter poses an argument for creativity as a lifestyleThe guitar that came to America in the hands of white European migrants in the early 1800s was still largely an instrument of classical rather than popular purpose. Around this same time, the banjo appeared in the hands of enslaved people, the instrument an iteration of the simple folk instruments they knew from Africa. But what followed and has influenced modern popular music for over a hundred years is much more complex and more collaborative (albeit accidentally) than the familiar trope that “white kids’ rock ’n’ roll just stole the Black blues.” What actually happened was a series of baton exchanges between Euro-American and Black musicians.
In the mid- to late nineteenth century, early domestic guitar makers like C. F. Martin & Co. perpetuated the guitar’s classical heritage, initially producing bespoke, highly ornate instruments destined for white players in the concert halls, salons, and prosperous homes of East Coast America.
Around the same time, the banjo was taken up by white performers appearing in blackface minstrel shows. From 1820 onward, minstrel-show music was by far the most popular music performed in America. Minstrelsy led to an eighty-year-long miseducation among its majority audience (young white males), imprinting upon them its crude, caricatured portrayals of Black men and women as lazy, stupid, deceitful, and dishonest.
During America’s industrial revolution and through the Civil War and the social tumult that followed, the guitar was democratized. Its journey south from prosperous East Coast cities to an impoverished Appalachia created a white blues—what became known as hillbilly and old-time music. Farther south, Black players started picking up cheap, factory-made, mail-order guitars, and the six-string flat-top widely replaced the banjo. Joining the Great Migration of African Americans that had started around 1910, many players moved north to earn their living in Chicago and New York.
The music Southern Blacks played in the Northern cities was a blend of jazz, gospel, white hillbilly ballads, dance tunes, and ragtime. By the 1950s, and now as older players, they found themselves in need of a new audience, and Black blues musicians travelled across the Atlantic in search of one. They found it in England. By the early 1960s, white British beat groups that had “borrowed” Black blues and rhythm and blues reimported it back to the United States. The “British Invasion,” with the guitar leading the charge, reinvented and reignited American interest in rock ’n’ roll and changed the face of popular music forever.
Although the British Invasion was largely electric, it was the acoustic guitar that became the weapon of the ’60s protest singer and the constant companion of the ’70s singer-songwriter. It was almost killed off by disco in the 1980s, only to be rediscovered by ’90s baby boomers as electric rock ’n’ roll “unplugged.” By the end of the century, a new generation of players was reinvigorating the acoustic guitar’s musical journey in genres like Americana, alt-country, and new folk.
In each of those decades, the guitar enabled musicians—regardless of sex, creed, class, or color—to make their names and put their own stamp on the shape of popular music.
This is the story of the instruments they played, the music they made, and the influence it has had on us all.
The above is excerpted from The Devil Is in It: A History of the American Acoustic Guitar by John Stubbings, published by University of Texas Press
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