Guitars had been considered less than respectable instruments for a long, long time.
Citterns, and other forerunners of the modern guitar were considered instruments for commoners and were not widely respected. The guitar itself was frequently thought of as an instrument for laborers and cowboys, not for serious musicians.
The mandolin was boosted in its stature by a traveling act in the 19th century called Estudiantina Figaro. This group, who actually played Spanish bandurrias and not mandolins, sparked the mandolin craze, a popular music fad that lasted roughly 40 years and still affects our music today. Mandolin orchestras were formed and it became fashionable to own a mandolin. If your kids were taking mandolin lessons it was something to be proud of. Simple stringed instruments were finally being accepted into “polite society”.
Next came the tenor banjo, which was very common as a rhythm instrument in the 1920s and '30s. The banjo had volume and could really drive a band but it was not as good at sounding warm and subdued as a guitar.
Jazz guitar came into being during the transitional period that started as the orchestra gave way to the big band and then eventually was replaced by the small groups that have characterized so much of the music world ever since. The guitar replaced the banjo as a chordal instrument and grew from that point onward. The electric guitar made it feasible for a guitarist to take a solo and be heard on par with a horn solo. Even with all of this the guitar suffered from a lot of PR problems.
For one thing, memories tend to outlast the facts and many people could only think of the guitar in terms of being a cheap instument for some lonely cowboy. It might have been ok to hear one in a band but paying to have your children learn such an instrument just wasn’t in the cards for a lot of people. Secondly, playing rhythm chords struck some people as being simplistic and not worthy of being considered true musical ability. For many, many years the first question asked if you identified yourself as a guitarist was “rhythm or lead?”
Of course nothing could be further from the truth. A good rhythm guitarist is as rare as hen’s teeth and as valuable as gold. To perform rhythm and do it properly is an art unto itself but this was just one of the many hurdles the guitar faced in its struggle to be accepted as a serious musical instrument. As the Big Band era went on the guitar made it up front from time to time but it still wasn’t widely respected. The post-WW II years saw a lot of changes in music and the Jazz guitarist finally grew to prominence in the small groups of the day paving the way for more development of the guitar in Jazz but also for guitarists in other areas.
In the journey that has seen the guitar go from being a folk instrument that was barely tolerated in polite society to becoming almost ubiquitous in modern music there have been many heroes that have helped to establish the instrument as legitimate. Over the next few pages I will attempt to tell a bit of their stories. This is by no means meant to be comprehensive, I'm leaving out many more players than I am including, but these are the people that have captured my attention.
