LOOKING AT THE GUITAR 100 YEARS AGO
A History And Possibility For Our Favorite Instrument
It hit me the other day that it would be fun to sit down and describe what the guitar was like 100 years ago. If you consider its humble beginnings as a simple piece of wood with a couple of strings to its rise as the most iconic instrument in pop culture, it has come a long way. With all of the advancements in technology and the speed at which things now move, it is hard to comprehend how much further it might go if we allow it the chance. I like to imagine myself in the past, looking at those old guitars, knowing what the future will bring for them. This helps me to envision what might meet us in the future. So, without any further introduction, let’s time travel. I’m grabbing a nice three-piece suit and a fedora. The hoodie I usually wear wasn’t created until the 1930s. So sad.
1
A Year To Remember
In 1925, radio had just begun, television was a couple of decades away, and the American economy under President Calvin Coolidge was booming. You would have never dreamed that the Great Depression, one of the worst economic failures in world history, was only five years away. Firmly planted between the two World Wars, 1925 was a year that had left the tragedy of the First War in the rearview mirror, living in blissful ignorance of the horrors that the Second would soon bring. It is fair to say it was a year of optimism while also exemplifying a certain naiveté about the future. You don’t know what you don’t know, and you can’t prepare for what you aren’t expecting. That alone is enough to write about, but I promised you a piece on guitar, not a life lesson.
Music was becoming what we see it as today, a product, a commodity, and an industry that would rival anything the world had ever seen. Recording technology was in its infancy, and a new electronic recording method was about to have a profound impact on how people consumed music and how it would evolve. Suddenly, it was beginning to have a new consumeristic personality, and the guitar would soon prove itself to be a vital element in the industry’s impact on culture through the new mediums of recordings and radio. Music had always been a living reality where songs and performances were a thread in the fabric of human life. A guitar at the edge of a campfire, a piano in the living room, or a concert hall symphony shared the same universal experience of being a live performance. If you wanted to hear music, you needed to find a musician or become one yourself. That was changing.
I think music had an extraordinary power then that still exists today but is hidden under the convenience and access we have grown accustomed to. Imagine if television didn’t exist and every show you wanted to see was performed on a stage. Consider how, before photography, a brush across the canvas was the definition of a picture. Music was slowly abandoning its purest original form. Being the romantic that I am, I often wonder what that was like. Live music or no music were the only options. Musicians were always front and center.
1925 was a sort of halfway point for the guitar, and although it had evolved into a new voice that was finally stepping out on its own, it wasn’t what it would be. To appreciate the guitar of 1925, let’s see what it was like before.
2
A Little History To Help Us Understand
Early on, guitar was not an instrument that led. It was almost always accompanied by louder and more vibrant instruments like the banjo or mandolin. I know it is hard to imagine this trio as anything more than a Bluegrass ensemble, but it was so much more. Bluegrass was twenty years away, and this trio of instruments had been a significant contributor to popular music for several decades. The guitar needed these two partners in crime, so let me take a moment to explain.
Just a few decades back, we started to see the beginnings of the traditionally accepted “classical” guitar transform into something entirely new. If you’ve ever played a classical guitar, you know they don’t exactly scream rock & roll. They are delicate, sensitive, and soft-spoken instruments that must be experienced firsthand, from close range and without distraction. This was problematic because large musical gatherings in auditoriums–concerts–were becoming commonplace. As you can imagine, you are in a less-than-ideal situation when playing a classical guitar in a concert hall and trying to reach the nosebleeds.
The typical solution to this was to add louder and more pronounced instruments to the stage, such as the banjo and mandolin. The guitar desperately wanted to escape the shadows and stand on its own, but it needed some help. Thankfully, necessity is the mother of invention, and people who loved the instrument’s versatility and sound began to diligently experiment with solving this problem.
Most notably, in the mid-1800s, C.F. Martin & Company developed and standardized a new X-Bracing system that gave the instrument more stability and strength so that a newly developed type of steel strings could be used instead of the traditional gut or nylon strings. This change added more volume, clarity, and versatility to the guitar, which hadn’t really changed over a few hundred years. This modification is arguably the most important change in the history of the guitar and, still to this day, defines the sound of countless artists.
Even though steel strings were a game changer, by the turn of the century, it was becoming clear that the guitar was developing an incurable ailment that can still be seen today. It wanted to be louder.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Gibson created a carved-top acoustic guitar (arch top) that projected so well that it became the standard for the new Jazz Era of music that was evolving. Another notable push for volume during this time came from a naval officer named George Breed, who was awarded US patent no. 435,679, “A Method of and apparatus for producing musical sounds by electricity.” It was the first-ever attempt at electrifying a stringed and fretted instrument. It wasn’t good, and there are no known recordings of its sound, but it was pointed in the right direction. Breed’s attempt teaches us a valuable lesson about invention. You can’t make the car until you have a wheel. The valve amplifier that an electrified instrument needed in order to be heard wasn’t invented until 1906, sixteen years after Georg’s patent. He was ahead of his time. Literally.
The early 20th century settled into the guitar technologies of the previous fifty years, and by 1920, jazz, big band, and ragtime were dominating popular music. Blues was the new kid on the block, and guitarists from the Mississippi Delta like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, and Charlie Patton were building the foundation for what Robert Johnson would do a decade later, giving permission and influence to artists who would eventually create Rock and roll.
3
Focusing In
Now that we understand a bit about the context, what was it like to be a guitar or, better yet, a guitarist in 1925?
To start with, the world was slow, and this slowness gave a different pulse to the life of a musician that we can’t relate to today. I often talk about my experience as a teenager learning guitar in the late 1990s as if it were some ancient age where dragons and sea monsters roamed the isles of my local Blockbuster Video store. I printed tablatures on a dot matrix printer from websites that used an index system, and I went to the grocery store to sit on the floor and look at the newest issue of Guitar One. That was almost thirty years ago, and if you’re Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha, you probably think I’m an elderly man about to need resuscitation every time I mention how I cut my teeth on Grunge and how the “real music” came to us from a land called Seattle.
Try to imagine life thirty years ago. It was a completely different world. There is no iPhone in your pocket, no YouTube to learn from, no Sweetwater to buy new gear from, no Spotify to listen to the latest and greatest thing, and no chance of having John Mayer teach you his famous riffs on TikTok. You learned, shopped, and found inspiration from the people around you, and everything you did existed in the community you were from.
I remember this from my era of learning guitar. It wasn’t as much as the 20s, but it still existed. I watched a guy in my Science class play “The Distance” by Cake. He was so cool. He had a mustache and wore band T-shirts that seemed as though they were exported from the big city to the hills of Alabama by ship and wagon train. I would stare at his hands and eventually pick up where to put mine. It was an exchange of energy, a physical experience I've never found inside a screen. I also became friends with a guy who could play “Johnny B Goode” and do two-handed Van Halen tapping. I knew I had to step up my game or be left behind.
I also lived at the very end of the Musicians Friend catalog era before internet shopping, and remember lots of my gear coming to my front door after a phone call using a landline to the 1-800 number on the order form. As retro as that is, the best memories don’t come from that, they come from a few music stores I was fortunate to live near. Russellville Music, Joyful Noise, and Counts Brothers were sacred temples that held the most holy of instruments and accessories. I would beg my mom to take me so I could look around and touch things I could never afford. In this almost spiritual practice, I encountered many people who became formative to my guitar journey.
And I wasn’t distracted by pointless things. I knew boredom, and that boredom led me to find a cure. It was the guitar. I know I’m supposed to be talking about 1925, but I wasn’t there. It’s hard to be sure that I’m not just blowing smoke about an era I didn't touch with my own hands, but I do know what 1994 was like, and I think we were much more similar to the 20s than where we are now. If I had no distractions, I guarantee they were even more free from the tyranny of constant notifications, endless streaming options, mindless scrolling, and so many possibilities that your mind numbs itself into a state of paralysis to release itself of the burden of choosing a destination. They had beautiful moments of boredom that led them to the guitar, not just as a thing to do, but as a friend. That’s what it was to me.
So yeah, 1925 was different. I think it’s fair to say that guitar then was more special than it is now. I’ve noticed that when my wife and I buy our kids lots of Christmas gifts, they don’t really attach to any of them, but when we make things more singular and simple, they connect with something because it’s clearly in front of them. Less is more and I worry that today, we have so many possibilities to play with that we don't commit to the mastery of any one thing. I also think the community aspect of the 20s was beautiful. We have so many virtual connections, but is it really the same? They went out at night to listen and to play. They taught each other and bounced ideas around with unashamed curiosity. You saw the newest guitar because someone was playing it right in front of you, not because the algorithm pointed you to it through a paid ad.
I think we would have liked it then.
4
The Ending
I started writing this thinking I would lay out some brilliant exposition of how technology pushes us into new places of creativity as guitarists and how we can’t ever really imagine what is next, no matter how smart we think we are. I wanted to talk about how George Beauchamp’s electric guitar was only eight years away, and they could never imagine the impact it would have on the world. I had things to say about how the Second World War would freeze the guitar’s forward technological development dead in its tracks, but just like Leo Fender, you must keep making things, even if it’s done in secret. I thought it was poetic that B.B. King was born in 1925. He was a shining example of how we, as guitarists, can cross the boundaries of innovation just like the guitar has and share a unique sound and soul with those who will listen. I guess this turned into a life lesson after all.
There is so much to say about how the guitar has existed in our society over the last 100 years and what it might possibly be involved in through our next 100. Whatever happens, it’s a fact that the guitar doesn’t really want or need to evolve, but it allows us to amuse ourselves with new innovations from time to time. As an instrument, it is slow, and it has changed slowly. Maybe that’s its dark magic? At one event in Chicago last week, I played a shoegaze set with two friends. I used a Jazzmaster, two very loud tube amplifiers in stereo, and so much digital delay the Edge might have blushed. The very next day, I sat in a quiet theater while Blake Mills performed beautifully on an all but archaic classical guitar. It was the most versatile thing in existence those two days, but in all of its many facets, it was still wood and string. The simplest recipes are often the best. Both times, it made me slow down and be. There was the time and space, the guitar, and me. It required nothing more.
What am I taking away from this thought experiment? I love where we are in 2024, but I also long for what they had in 1925. I guess I love the simple and the slow over the complicated and busy that most of us find ourselves in today. The guitar is an instrument for sure, but maybe not in the way we think. It’s an instrument of rebellion. We often think of its loud and rowdy abilities when considering this side of its nature, but I wonder if its simplicity and calm confidence in the face of a clamoring digital age is its most rebellious and inspiring trait.
Thinking about the last 100 years makes me think about the next, and I’m trying to imagine 2124. I genuinely hope it looks more like a perfect play-through of The Sims than Fallout, and I hope that the guitar is still doing the impossible, just like it is today.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” - Ernest Hemingway / 1925.
Have a great day and if you have insight or information you want to share outside of the comments - blog@jhspedals.com