In combination, the European troubadour traditions of folk music and the spiritual music of African slaves evolved into a guitar-and banjo-based music that first became ragtime and then morphed into jazz. The guitar's role was problematic, though, because it never seemed loud enough to cut through all the other instruments of the group. That was one reason for the banjo's popularity. It might not be as sophisticated a musical instrument as the guitar, but in an ensemble situation it held its own against a blaring cornet, braying trombone, squawking clarinet, and the thumping of a drummer and the crash of his cymbals.

George Breed, a U.S. naval officer, received a patent in 1890 for “an apparatus for producing musical sounds by electricity.” His patent diagram resembles a very early figure-eight shaped instrument with six strings activated by electricity and magnetism.

In 1907, Lee DeForest invented the triode. A triode is a vacuum tube capable of (are you ready?) amplifying weak electrical signals. This component provides an output strong enough to be fed into a loudspeaker. This invention would soon lend itself to the circuitry found in radios and old phonographs.

More Volume

The search for more volume led Lloyd Loar, an engineer at the Gibson guitar company, to play around with electrified guitars and amplifiers. In 1924, his experiments with magnetic coils led to the development of a basic pickup, which was, in effect, a giant magnet shaped like a horseshoe that acted as a microphone for each of the strings of the guitar. The signal was then fed through a speaker with a volume control and a tone control. It was all very rudimentary stuff. Gibson didn't get the idea, though, and Loar left and formed the Vivitone Company, which produced commercial guitar pickups during the 1930s.

The First Commercial Electric Guitar

The real breakthrough came in 1931, when Paul Barth and George Beau-champ joined forces with Adolph Rickenbacker to form the Ro-Pat-In Company (later renamed the Electro String Company). They then produced the first commercially available electric guitar, the A22 and A25 cast-aluminum lap-steel guitar, known as the “frying pan” because of its shape.

Strictly speaking, the “frying pan” wasn't really an electric version of a traditional guitar; rather, it was more of a lap-steel or Hawaiian guitar. However, in 1932 Ro-Pat-In produced the “Electro,” which was an archtop, or F-hole, steel-string guitar fitted with a horseshoe magnet. Gibson finally caught on and adapted their L-50 archtop model into the now famous ES-150 electric model, which first appeared in 1936.

The musician who was to make the electric guitar a household word, Charlie Christian, was not actually the first electric guitar player. That role fell to Eddie Durham, who played a resonator guitar in Bennie Moten's jazz group from 1929 and recorded the first electric guitar solo, “Hittin' the Bottle,” in 1935, with Jimmie Lunceford's band. He then made some historic recordings in New York City in 1937 and 1938 with the Kansas City Six, a spin-off group of musicians from Count Basie's Big Band that featured Lester Young on clarinet as well as saxophone. For the first time, the guitar was easily a match in volume and single-note improvisation for Young's saxophone and clarinet as well as the trumpet of Buck Clayton.

There was one fundamental problem with the electric guitar, though — it kept feeding back. The amplified sound from the speaker would cause the body of the guitar to vibrate until a howl started that could only be stopped by turning the volume off. Guitarists found they were continually adjusting their volume levels to stop their instruments from feeding back. The answer was to create an instrument that didn't vibrate in sympathy with its amplified sound.

The Solid-Bodied Guitar

There's no definitive agreement about who produced the first solid-bodied guitar. Guitarist Les Paul created a “Log” guitar, using a Gibson neck on a flat piece of wood. He went to Gibson to get it into production, but Gibson, once again, was not impressed and turned him down.

At the same time, country guitarist Merle Travis was working with engineer Paul Bigsby, and they produced about a dozen solid-body guitar prototypes. However, the man who made the first commercially available solid-body guitar was Leo Fender, the owner of an electrical repair shop. In 1946, he founded the Fender Electrical Instrument Company to produce Hawaiian guitars and amplifiers. Encouraged by an employee, George Fullerton, Fender designed and eventually marketed a line of solid-body guitars called the Fender Broadcaster in 1950. The Gretsch drum company manufactured drums called Broadcaster, however, and told Fender he couldn't use that name. So Fender changed the name of his guitar to the Telecaster. The rest is history.

The solid-bodied electric guitar paved the way for the popularization of urban blues and an R&B boom in the 1950s, with such great musicians as Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, and so forth. These musicians in turn influenced a generation of young rock-and-roll players in the 1960s in England, including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Robert Fripp, and Jimmy Page.