A People's History of the Guitar

This episode is about Lutes. Not the Lute we know , but the Lutes we call Lutes that aren't the Lute we know, which came before the Lute we know, which is a Lute that led to the guitar...which is also a Lute. The episode spans a couple of thousand years, and thousands of miles, to paint a picture of ancestors of the guitar that were common among many ancient peoples, and which connected the musica...

From The Lyres of Ur in episode 10, this episode takes us 1,000 years into the future, and 1,000 miles to the west of Mesopotamia, to ancient Egypt. Once we're there, we'll find a 3,500 year-old musical instrument, played by the in-house musician of the architect and polymath, Sen-en-Mut, who was in the employ of the first female Pharoah, Hat-Shepsut. Sen-en-Mut's favorite musician was named Har-M...

In this episode we uncover the oldest existing examples of the kinds of string instruments that led to the guitar. They're called The Lyres of Ur , they're over 4,000 years old, and they were discovered in the 1930s by someone with the best name ever for a British archaeologist, alongside his extremely interesting wife. Filled with a couple of distractingly curious side-stories, this episode also...

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-...

This episode goes off-road a little. I'm late to the party, but when I recently (finally) saw Ryan Coogler's Sinners , I couldn't not do an episode on this movie. Sinners is a cracking good vampire movie that also happens to be a micro-history of Black Music, with details that can tell us a lot about the history of string instruments in the United States. Its about the guitar, people and their gui...

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 stri...

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 o...

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 th...

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, bu...

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 n...

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 br...

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. Support the project here! Episode playlist here. I'll be tinkering with these playlists periodically, so feel free to add them to y...

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 t...

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! This podcast uses the following third-part...