Guitar - Social History, Cultural Studies, and Sources

The function and place of the guitar in various societies through the years is still a wide open and relatively underappreciated aspect of its history. Other instruments, like the piano, have already had landmark books written on their social histories. Witness Arthur Loesser's Men, Women and Pianos (1954, reissued by Dover in 1991), and James Parakilas' Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano (Yale Univ. Press, 1999).  Currently there is a Wikipedia entry, "Social history of the piano," but so far nothing comparable for the guitar.

This guide to research aims to recognize the social and cultural studies that have been done thus far on the guitar's behalf, including Web sites (as works in progress), and to suggest online resources that could yield good results if they were well and wisely searched.

1. Currently Available Socio-Historical Studies the Guitar

Many interesting studies of the guitar in its social context were cited in the regular "Works in Progress / Completed" column that this writer has been contributing to Soundboard for over thirty years.  Among them are these studies, which tend to be limited to particular "guitar cultures," as the title of a recent anthology (see 2001gc below) puts it. These articles, dissertations, and books touch in significant measure, if not exclusively, on the guitar's social history. Jeffrey Noonan's publications of 2008 and 2009 are good examples of the value of early published references to the guitar as source material.

1998wg -"Women and the Guitar in Spain's Upper Classes," by Richard Pinnell, in Anuario Musical - Revista de Musicología del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, vol. 53 (1998): 165-189.

1999ga - "The guitar in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires: Towards a cultural history of an Argentine musical emblem," by Melanie Plesch (Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 1999), 448 pages. Available in full as a PDF file, through member libraries, from ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

1999rg - "The Golden Age of the Russian Guitar: Repertoire, Performance Practice, and Social Function of the Russian Seven-String Guitar Music, 1800-1850," by Oleg Timofeyev (Ph.D. diss., Duke U., 1999), 584 p.

2001ag - The History of the American Guitar: From 1833 to the Present Day, by Tony Bacon (New York: Friedman/Fairfax Publishers; Distributed by Sterling Pub. Co., 2001), 148 p. 

2001gc - Guitar Cultures, edited by Andy Bennett and Kevin Dawe (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2001), x, 215 p.; ill., music; 24 cm.  The Table of Contents of this far-reaching "world guitar" collection includes articles such as the following:

"Introduction: Guitars, Cultures, People and Places," Kevin Dawe and Andy Bennett;

"The Guitar in the Blues Music of the Deep South," David Evans;

"Handmade in Spain: The Culture of Guitar Making," Kevin Dawe with Moira Dawe;

"The Guitar as Artifact and Icon: Identity Formation in the Babyboom Generation," John Ryan and Richard A. Peterson;

"The Guitar Cultures of Papua New Guinea: Regional, Social, and Stylistic Diversity," Denis Crowdy;

"Hybridity and Segregation in the Guitar Cultures of Brazil," Suzel Ana Riley;

"Rock to Raga: The Many Lives of the Indian Guitar," Martin Clayton.

2003ga - "‘The Association That I Have With This Guitar Is My Life': The Guitar as Artifact and Symbol," by Holly Everett, in Popular Music and Society, vol. 26/3 (Oct 2003): 331-350.

2004ga -  "The Guitar in America as Reflected in Topical Periodicals, 1882-1933," by Jeffrey J. Noonan (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 2004).

2006rr - Rock & Roll: A Social History, by Paul Friedländer, Peter Miller (Basic Books, 2nd ed., 2006), 388 pp.

2007tg - "From Tinkerers to Gods: The Electric Guitar and the Social Construction of Gender," by Monique M. Bourdage (M.S.S. thesis, Univ. of Colorado at Denver, 2007), 117 pp.

2008ga - The Guitar in America: Victorian Era to Jazz, by Jeffrey J. Noonan (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), vii, 239 pp.  Cataloging information describes its contents as follows:

The guitar in America to 1880 -- Interlude: the BMG movement--the sources -- The guitar in the BMG movement 1880-1900 -- Interlude : a new generation of guitarists -- Transitions: from the parlor to the concert hall -- Interlude: the guitar as icon -- A new instrument -- Interlude: the wizard and the grand lady -- The old world reclaims its instrument -- Summary and conclusions.

2009bmg - The Guitar in American Banjo, Mandolin and Guitar Periodicals, 1882-1933, by Jeffrey J. Noonan (Madison: A-R Editions, 2009).  It is vol. 35 of the Music Library Association's Index and Bibliography Series, and is available directly from the publisher for $50. It has nearly 5500 entries and over 100 pages of indices. The author's summary states:

This bibliography documents the guitar's role in the B.M.G. movement with a chronological list of articles, news items, advertisements, illustrations, and photographs and a list of musical works for guitar published I the BMG magazines.  The second section of the bibliography is a series of indices which link names and subjects to these lists. 

2. Guitar-Oriented Socio-Historical Web Sites

These Web sites emphasize to various degrees the guitar as a cultural-historical phenomenon:

Historical pictures of guitar playing through the ages have been gathered into a kind of virtual museum by Dag Arve Lindsetmo (Trondheim, Norway) in his site, www.Klassiskgitar.net.  Guitar iconography is a microcosm well worth exploring!

The Baroque guitar is the focus of Monica Hall's delightful and informative site, and the best place to find her articles and studies, including her notable "Stringing of the 5-Course Guitar."  See www.monicahall.co.uk

The Early Romantic Guitar site (www.earlyromanticguitar.com) has links not only to the instrument and its evolution, but also to "time periods" and to a host of "guitar composers."

Harp-guitars of all kinds are pictured and promoted in their full historical and cultural breadth at www.harpguitars.net.

The Unstrung History of the American Guitar, by Dave Bradford, is a growing compilation of articles and photographs exploring the Guitar in 19th-c. American music. See http://www.19thcenturyguitar.com/.

The European Guitar Teachers Association site (www.egta.co.uk) has a growing number of online Articles exploring many dimensions of the guitar's history, including Aesthetics, Guitar around the world, Composers, Repertoire, etc.

3. Historical Source Indexes (general in scope, restricted access)

Searching for evidence of the guitar and guitarists in historical full-text databases can be a very fruitful way to shed light on the overlooked social and cultural history of the guitar.  The work that Jeffrey Noonan has done with the banjo, mandolin, and guitar periodicals is just the beginning of what could become a series of well-documented studies of the guitar as part of a cultural and social nexus.

Unfortunately the companies that produce these indexes do not simply mount their files on the Internet for anyone to visit and use for free.  They sell access to these databases by subscription, based on enrollment. Their primary clients are university libraries, and annual "site" subscriptions cost thousands of dollars. Each university library in turn controls access to these databases, often requiring that students and faculty log on with their university ID to use them.  There are some exceptions, like large public research libraries, which often subscribe as a public service. Interested researchers need to contact likely subscribing libraries to obtain online access to these kinds of online, keyword-searchable historical sources. Some databases listed below will also have affordable subscription arrangements for individuals.

Here are some good prospects for full-text searches of terms like "guitar" and "guitarist" (with number of retrievals of the term "guitar"):

The American Periodicals Series, 1740-1900, comprising general interest magazines published in the USA, such as The Family Magazine; or, Monthly Abstract of General Knowledge (New York, 1833-1841). Surprisingly rich retrievals!  ("guitar" = 12,783 documents; "guitarist" = 179)

American & English Literature: Poetry, Drama, and Prose, comprising the following collections

• Early American Fiction 1774-1850 (110 items)
• American Poetry 1600-1900 & 20th century (41)
• English Poetry 600-1900 & 20th century (91)
• American Drama (29)
• English Prose Drama (61)
• English Verse Drama 13th-19th centuries (32)

Eighteenth Century Journals: a Portal to Newspapers and Periodicals, c1685-1815. Brings together rare journals printed between c1685 and 1815 about all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life. (61 hits when searching "guitar" or "guittar")

Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875, attempts to include every novel published in the United States from 1851 to 1875 by well known writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, along with many forgotten authors whose works may have been very popular in their own time. (Searching "guitar" brought up an amazing 1335 matches in 513 records, for just this quarter-century!)

ARTFL is a French-language full text database that mines French literature from the 13th to the 20th centuries. It is a project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language, and is a cooperative project of the Institut National de la Langue Française (INaLF) of the Centre National de la Recherche, Scientifique (CNRS) and the Divisions of the Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Chicago.  (433 occurrences of "guitare," starting in 1840; 13 occurrences of "guitarre," from 1627 to 1756; 11 occurrences of "guiterre" from 1552 to 1656, and so forth.)

Early English Books Online contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1900,  (49 hits in 34 records for "guitar" and many variant spellings of the same.)

Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Nearly 150,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas, are included (30 retrievals of "guitar" or "guittar")

English Short Title Catalogue. Contains records for works printed in any language in England or its dependencies from the beginning of printing through the end of the eighteenth century, as well as works printed in English anywhere else in the world. (41 references to "guitar")

Index to English Literary Periodicals. Indexes 341 journals published in Great Britain in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Not full text. (4 citations of articles on the guitar)

Teatro Español del Siglo de Oro. Contains the most important dramatic works of sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain, published in full. (151 occurrences of the term "Guitarra" in 99 Spanish plays.)

Women Writers Online. Coverage is 1400-1850. Collection of searchable texts written by women that were previously only available in archives.  (11 occurrences of "guitar" and related terms.)

Literature Online. a fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 241 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources. ("Guitar" retrieves 16 poems, 9 literary works in journals, and 58 reviews and critical works)

LexisNexis Academic provides access to a wide range of news, business, legal, and reference information, mostly covering the last fifty years. Various portions of the database are updated daily and most information is full text. This is a huge contemporary resource, and covers all major US and foreign newspapers in full text, starting with the New York Times, December 1969- .)  Here are some sample retrievals:

• "Julian Bream" is mentioned in nearly 1,000 Worldwide English newspaper articles and reviews, starting in 1970. Imagine how valuable this database will be for anyone doing a serious study of the "critical reception" of Bream, Williams, Segovia, and any of their contemporaries.
• 2,080+ worldwide English newspapers & journals have mentioned the theorbo since it began receiving coverage in 1978. The same year, world newspapers also began to mention the "baroque guitar," and now there are 238+ articles and reviews about it. The chitarrone begins to draw attention in the English-speaking world after 1981, with 235+ articles and reviews discussing it in the intervening decades. This kind of data can help document these instruments' 20th-century revival in early music.

Visitors are invited to send suggestions for additions and corrections to Thomas F. Heck.