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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license. The low-fi acoustic guitarEarly blues musicians weren’t professional musicians. They were ordinary working people who created their instruments out of household items: washboards, spoons, pails, and so on. If you were a little more industrious, you could fashion a homemade guitar out of bailing wire, a broom handle, and a cigar box. Those fortunate enough to acquire an actual guitar would probably have an inexpensive acoustic guitar, perhaps picked up secondhand. As the blues became more popular, many musicians could make a living by traveling around to work camps and juke joints (which were roadside places without electricity that offered liquor, dancing, gambling, and sometimes prostitution) playing acoustic guitars and singing the blues for the weary working folk.
The semi-hollow-body electric guitarGradually, the different preferences of electric jazz and blues players started to diverge, with jazz players preferring the deeper hollow-body guitars and blues players choosing the thinner-bodied hollow guitars and the semi-hollow-body guitars. (The all-solid-wood guitar, or solid-body, hadn’t been invented yet.)
Many people consider the semi-hollow-body guitar, such as the Gibson ES-335, to be the ideal type of blues guitar. Driving this choice was the fact that the thinner guitars didn’t feed back (produce unwanted, ringing tones through the amp) as much as the deeper-bodied guitars, and because blues players generally like to play louder than jazz players, feedback was more of a concern. The Gibson ES-335 makes my list of one of the greatest guitars for playing the blues.
Solid-body electric guitarsThough pioneering rock guitarists like Scotty Moore with Elvis and Danny Cedrone with Bill Haley and the Comets were still playing hollow-body guitars, when rock ’n’ roll hit town in the mid-1950s, some people were playing solid-body guitars, blues players included. Two of the most popular solid-body models, the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul were both released in the mid-’50s and are still as popular as ever and represent two different approaches to the solid-body guitar.
In the early 1950s, B.B. King tried his hand with a Fender Esquire (similar to a Telecaster) and a Strat, but after he grabbed the thin hollow and semi-hollow Gibson that he named “Lucille,” he never switched back. And Muddy Waters, who played an older, more traditional form of blues, was right in fashion with an early model gold-top Les Paul in the mid-1950s. He eventually settled on his iconic red Telecaster.
The Collision of Two Worlds: Acoustic versus ElectricElectric guitars came on the scene only in the late 1930s, and then only to those who could afford them. Thus, the acoustic guitar in blues had a long run, and the style continued even after the advent of the more-popular electric guitar. The acoustic guitar remained popular for other types of music (mainly folk and country), but for blues, the electric was the instrument of choice from about 1940 on.
Today, both acoustic and electric guitar blues exist. In fact, there are several sub-genres in each. Acoustic guitar includes
Bottleneck or slide guitar
Instrumental blues
Singer-songwriter blues
Electric blues has two huge offshoots:
Traditional electric blues, as practiced today by Robert Cray, Buddy Guy, and B.B. King
Blues rock, which was started in the 1960s by British electric guitarists and continues on through Eric Clapton and John Mayer
Acoustics and electrics both produce great blues music, as will virtually any other type of guitar, whether it’s an acoustic nylon-string classical or a purple metallic-flake solidbody with green lightning bolts. The blues is unrestricted when it comes to instruments.
Today, acoustic and electric blues each offer a guitarist a world of history, repertoire, styles, instruments, techniques, and heroes to study and emulate. It’s no longer a conflict of “go electric or be a front-porch picker,” as it may have seemed in the late 1930s. Many players, Eric Clapton being a notable example, are excellent acoustic-blues players and have paid tribute in concert and in recordings to their acoustic blues roots.
Though you should always strive for the best guitar you can afford, be aware that blues guitarists from Robert Johnson on often played cheap instruments like Stellas, Kalamazoos, and Nationals. Hound Dog Taylor performed timeless slide classics on 1960s Japanese solid-body guitars. Sometimes the funkier the guitar, the funkier the blues can be.
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For Dummies is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.