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GUITAR EVOLUTION
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Both blues and country performers adapted immediately: Ernest Tubb, a Texas country singer and fan of Jimmie Rodgers, added an electric guitar to his band so they could be heard in the loud honky-tonks near the Texas oil fields, and T-Bone Walker, a Texas blues player, found he could play on an equal footing with a band of brass instruments when he had an amplified guitar. In Oklahoma, a young player he inspired, Charlie Christian, brought a new harmonic sophistication to the ideas Walker had originated and was propelled to a starring role in Benny Goodman's orchestra, while Leon McAuliffe, playing with Bob Wills' Texas Playboys, completely reinvented the steel guitar.
By the mid-1950s, electric guitars were everywhere. Muddy Waters, a Mississippian transplanted to Chicago, took the Delta slide-guitar style W. C. Handy had heard, adapted it to the electric guitar, and became the reigning king of the blues. In Nashville, Shot Jackson and Buddy Emmons, two lap steel guitarists, became frustrated with having to switch between necks to play their solos and installed a series of levers and cams to precisely stretch or loosen the strings on a single neck, thereby devising their own pedal steel guitar, the Sho-Bud. And in California, Les Paul, a guitarist who liked to tinker, found a way to harness the annoying tendency of electric guitars to feed back and make squealing noises by developing one with a solid body and pickups that fattened the instrument's sound, which made it even louder.
The coming of rock 'n' roll made the guitar king: Chuck Berry, discovered by Muddy Waters, became a teen idol through both his inventive songwriting and his distinctive electric guitar style, while Elvis Presley, who played acoustic guitar, was backed by Scotty Moore, a Memphian who played in a tradition begun by Paul Burlison, another white Memphis guitarist who had worked with bluesman Howlin' Wolf. Wolf later discovered a teenager named Hubert Sumlin, whose wild, distorted sound became the backbone of Wolf's band.
The folk revival of the 1960s saw guitars flying off the shelves of music stores as college students and others rediscovered the masters of 1930s blues and country music, and the arrival of the Beatles, playing electric guitars, caused another boom in the industry. When Eric Clapton left the pop-oriented British band the Yardbirds in 1965 to join John Mayall's Blues Breakers, the age of the guitar hero had already begun, starting with the American Mike Bloomfield, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and British guitarists Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies.
All of which fails to mention the spread of the guitar to Africa, where it became central to Congolese rhumba and soukous, as well as South African township jive, Ghanian highlife, and Malian pop; or the long-standing guitar-based flamenco tradition of Spain; or the daring adaptation of slide guitar to the Indian classical tradition by visionaries like Vishwa Mohan Bhatt. Nor does it take into account the completely unique Hawaiian slack key genre, the astonishing guitar music of Madagascar, or the virtuosos of Brazilian popular music. A couple of these traditions made it into the Crossroads Guitar Festival, but to try to incorporate all of them would probably have extended the festival to the present and beyond.
Top banner photos: John Mayer, Eric Clapton flanked by Doyle Bramhall II on guitar and Nathan East on bass, and a close-up of Clapton (Jun Sato/Wire Image). |
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"Crash 3," Clapton's graffiti Fender Stratocaster. |
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Jimmie Vaughan performed "Six Strings Down." |
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This program is available on DVD. |
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