A People's History of the Guitar – Details, episodes & analysis

A taste of the sound and purpose of the show.

If you want to see and hear where this goes as much as I do, I hope you'll think about supporting the project with a one-time or recurring contribution, or maybe both! Click here to help me create new and unique content, and reach more people. Thanks for listening, and for considering support for the project!

A People's History of the Guitar is about people, the guitar, people and their guitars, and the guitar and its people.

In this introductory episode, you'll find out about what the podcast is about, why I decided to do it in the first place, and who the podcast is for. Spoiler alert: it's for everybody.

I'm just getting this going, and episodes are coming as I finish them. My goal is a minimum of three episodes each month. We'll get there, especially if you keep listening, and if you'll consider supporting the project, so support the project here!

Episode playlist here. Some guitar-based music that means something to me. I'll be tinkering with these playlists periodically, so feel free to add them to your library, and revisit from time-to-time.

In this episode we'll go back in time, into a cave with a Greek God, where a mythical stringed instrument was created, and on to Wisconsin, California, and Mississippi, in search of an origin story for the guitar. The title might give you a hint of where we'll end up.

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Episode playlist here. I'll be tinkering with these playlists periodically, so feel free to add them to your library and revisit from time-to-time.

This episode is about one of the things that launched us on our journey toward making music, which would eventually get us to the guitar.

That one thing is our feet. Which is really two things.

When we began to walk upright, we introduced something new into our lives. Becoming bipedal, millions of years ago, gave us one of the foundations of music, and Disco, and CPR. It also helped to make our brains bigger, which made us smarter, and our walking feet and smarter noggins pointed us toward becoming musical beings.

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Episode playlist here. I'll be tinkering with these playlists periodically, so feel free to add them to your library and revisit from time-to-time.

You don't make musical sounds by just sitting there. You have to fight for them. Music begins with little acts of violence, and we've been learning how to do that for a very long time.

This episode is about turning kinetic energy into mechanical energy into sound energy. It's about force. It's about electrical circuits and stone arrowheads. It's about how we learned to make fists and hold guitar necks. It's about Stanley Kubrick and the Ramones, and how we learned important skills from breaking things, blowing speakers, and abusing musical instruments. Some of it's about me in 5th grade, and it's all about the fact that the guitar is...inevitable.

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Episode playlist here. I'll be tinkering with these playlists periodically, so feel free to add them to your library and revisit from time-to-time.

This episode takes us from the evolution of human musicality into the realm of music itself, and its origins. That story is big, controversial, and messy. So, I've sorted it into easily digestible summaries of the ideas of Charles Darwin, Steven Brown, and Steven Pinker: three thinkers whose work is important for understanding how and why we started making music. It could have been really long, but I've cleverly limited it to under 25 minutes.

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Here's a link to a brief and delightfully tension-filled conversation between Police drummer Stewart Copeland and Harvard Linguist/Psychologist Steven Pinker, referenced in the last third or so of the episode.

Episode playlist here. I'll be tinkering with these playlists periodically, so feel free to add them to your library and revisit from time-to-time.

Episode five is about one of the ways we organize human knowledge. It's also about two German musicologists who created a system for categorizing musical instruments, before the Nazis fucked it all up. And you bet it's relevant to the development of the guitar, because in the Hornbostel Sachs system, the guitar is barely a blip among the hundreds of tools humans use to make music. And if that's the case, why is the guitar...everywhere?

As we get into this long history, it's important to maintain a sense of humility.

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This is the first in a short series of episodes and interviews about how we turned cordage into chordage.

According to the Hornbostel-Sachs System for Musical Instrument Classification, the guitar is in the Chordophone category. And it wouldn't be there if it weren't for something we found, and manufactured, over tens of thousands of years, called cordage.

The story of cordage is under-told and overlooked, but it's everywhere, and it's one of our most important tools and materials. We take it for granted, but we shouldn't do that. It holds your shoes together. It's the stuff your clothes are made of. It's the thing that burns in the center of a candle. One type of cordage, called string, turns silent bows, boxes and slabs into stringed musical instruments, and that's why we're here.

Here's a link to a complete interview with a scholar mentioned in the episode, which should make for good supplemental reading.

Click here to support A People's History of the Guitar with a one-time or recurring contribution, or maybe both. If you want to see where this goes as much as I do, you can help me to produce unique new content and reach more people with a broader perspective on an instrument that changed the world.

Go back and check out the previous episodes in order if you haven't already, and thanks for being curious about what I'm trying to do here.

This is the second in a short series of episodes and interviews about that thing we made, that if we hadn't made, there would be no guitar.

Episode six is about how we learned to make a string and pull it tight between two fixed points to make a weapon. The bow and arrow changed the way we lived, ate, and killed each other. And the bow part of the bow and arrow might be a prototype for future stringed musical instruments (chordophones). That's because until we taught ourselves how to make string, and pull it tight enough to do something, we would never have learned to pull those strings tight enough to make pitched sounds when we pluck, strum, and bow them.

Without tensioned strings there are no bows and arrows. Without bows and arrows, there are no harps, lyres, lutes, shoelaces, or Diddley Bows. And there are no guitars. So let's travel from an obscure book from 1899 back to a hunter on a grassy plain 65,000 years ago, to a guitar player in New York in 1978, and think about why and how each of our guitar strings might have an ancient weapon inside of it.

Click here to support A People's History of the Guitar with a one-time or recurring contribution, or maybe both. If you want to see where this goes as much as I do, you can help me to produce unique new content and reach more people with a broader perspective on an instrument that changed the world.

Go back and check out the previous episodes in order if you haven't already, because this thing is initially best understood if you go from first to last. Thanks for being curious about what I'm trying to do here.

Episode nine about the word guitar. That's not bad grammar, its a question: what is the origin of the word, guitar?

It's an odd word with deep roots, and the evolution of the word tracks with the evolution of the instrument itself. Join me for a slightly speculative, and ultimately inconclusive, exploration of one word that might have come from more than one place, because no word comes out of no-where.

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Check out all previous episodes below. Episodes appear in order of publication (oldest first rather than newest first) because that's how I want it, ya know? Anyway, to get a clearer sense of what this thing is about and where its going, start with episode one, below, and listen in order. But feel free to bounce around as much as you like, because you can do that without any interference from me. But maybe at least listen to Episodes one and five, OK?

Episode related playlist on the way!