Author: Tim Brookes

Ed. Note: In part two of his series on the guitar in 19-century America, Tim Brookes addresses the common belief that the guitar was strictly a ladies’ parlor instrument by finding guitars being made – and played – by men. “Over the last century,” began a recent guitar history, parroting conventional wisdom, “the guitar has evolved from a parlor instrument for young urban ladies.” The remainder of the series can be read at Part One: The Guitar in Non-Anglo America and Part Three: Women.

In mid century, the guitar was one of the most popular instruments in America, played by men and women. It was Stephen Foster’s first instrument, taught to him by his sister. And when “Old Folks at Home” was published in 1851, a contemporary observer wrote that the song “…is on everybody’s tongue, and consequently in everybody’s mouth. Pianos and guitars groan with it, night and day; sentimental young ladies sing it; sentimental young gentlemen warble it in midnight serenades; volatile young bucks hum it in the midst of their business and pleasures; boatmen roar it out… all the bands play it.”

Septimus Winner, one of the most prolific and successful composers (now remembered for “Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone”), made almost 2,000 arrangements of various tunes and pieces for violin, guitar, and piano, not to mention writing and publishing instruction books.

When The Baltimore Olio and American Musical Gazette first appeared in 1850, the publisher promised that each issue would include at least six pages of music arranged for piano, guitar, flute and violin. These and other arrangements for guitar were, in at least some cases, quite imaginative, including effects intended to imitate hunting horns, trumpets, drums, and bugles.

Nor was the guitar merely an affectation of middle-class men. Farmers played guitars at barn dances and square dances. Miners took guitars to mining camps. Railroad workers took guitars when building railroads. Lumberjacks took guitars to logging camps. The showman Ossian Dodge, according to his biographer, earned $11,000 in nine months singing and accompanying himself on the guitar. Soldiers took guitars with them for companionship during the Civil War and whalers took them aboard ships. Basques bringing guitars settled in Oregon, Nevada, and Idaho; Portuguese bringing guitars settled in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and California. Thomas Eakins, with his usual near-photographic precision, painted a scruffy cowboy playing his guitar at his kitchen table.

The guitar probably wasn’t thought of as small or quiet: it was what it was, and when it came to music, as with much else in life, 19th-century Americans were used to taking whatever they could get and making the best of it. When a San Francisco-to-Chicago train was so badly held up by snow that the journey took three weeks, at one particularly long stop in Percy, Wyoming, the passengers (who included Susan B. Anthony, senators, Japanese princes, and a Russian count) held a “ball” in the back of a grocery store, with dance music “furnished by a guitar, a mouth-harmonicon, and a fine-tooth comb.” By all accounts, the Times reported, “The pleasure was exquisite.”

Mark Twain, very much a man’s man, owned a Style 21/2-17 Martin (his sister supplemented the family income by teaching guitar and piano) that he bought used in 1861 for $10, and kept until shortly before his death. In Roughing It, Twain wrote that after he and the rest of his fellow newspapermen had put the paper to bed, they had “a relaxing concert as usual – for some of the printers were good singers and others good performers on the guitar and on that atrocity the accordeon.”

Guys were even playing guitar (or at least dancing to it) at hunting camp. Sounding almost exactly like Charles Dickens’ Mr. Jingle in Pickwick Papers, Sir William Howard Russell gives a telegrammatic account of a day’s sport: “Gunpowder River, Saltpetre River, facing Chesapeake; on either side lakes and tidal water; the owner, Slater, an Irishman, reputed very rich, self-made. Dinner at one o’clock; any number of canvas-backed ducks, plentiful joints; drink whiskey; company, Swan, Howard, Duval, Morris, and others, also extraordinary specimen named Smith, believed never to wash except in rain or by accidental sousing in the river. Went out for afternoon shooting; birds wide and high; killed 17; back to supper at dusk. McDonald and a guitar came over; had a Negro dance; and so to bed about 12:00.”

Moving even farther up the macho scale, we find the guitar at logging camps. “Many might think lumberjacks longed for entertainment during the months they were isolated from their families and friends,” wrote one veteran of the trade. “But they did not seem to mind being in the woods.

“In nearly every camp were those who liked to clog, tell stories, sing, and recite poetry. There was a various amount of talent along musical lines. Those who were fond of music usually brought a guitar, mandolin, banjo, violin, accordion, harmonica, or jews-harp to camp. From these instruments they had a lot of entertainment.”

The guitar also went with men to war. Although the banjo was rising in popularity during the Civil War, several references speak of companies forming their own string or minstrel bands, including guitars. (Guitars also turn up in Pershing’s army and with increasing frequency in the wars of the 20th century.)

In Belden, the White Chief; or Twelve Years Among the Indians of the Plains (1870), George Belden makes Army life sound pleasant, almost lyrical, thanks to its musical interludes: “It is near sunset, the bugles sound the halt, and the columns file off into camp. The cavalry horses are sent out to graze, the tents put up, fires lighted, and the suppers put on to cook… If the air is cool the Sibley stoves are put up, and the evening is spent in telling stories, playing at cards, and singing songs. Here is heard the thrumming of a guitar; there are a lot of officers playing euchre, and yonder a group of soldiers telling tales…”

It’s commonly assumed that African-Americans didn’t start playing guitars until the turn of the century, and then largely in the Deep South, but this, too, is a myth. A New York Times correspondent visiting Key West before the Civil War reported seeing Negroes playing guitars. A survey in Philadelphia in 1849 suggests that in a black population of 9,076, 32 were professional musicians and others were part-timers, such as the man who described himself as “Portrait Sign and Ornamental Painter, Daguerrotypist, Teacher of Photography, the Guitar and Singing.”

One of the most famous guitar teachers, composers, and arrangers of the time was Justin Miner Holland (1819-1897), who studied at Oberlin and settled in Cleveland, writing music, composing, and teaching, though often in circumstances of considerable poverty. Holland was one of the few American composers whose works were known in the U.S. and abroad. He published three collections: Holland’s Comprehensive Method for the Guitar, Holland’s Modern Method for the Guitar, and Gems for the GuitarM.

Holland’s obituary in the Cleveland Plain Dealer said: “Professor Holland has made Cleveland his home for years, and sought in this city to create and maintain a love for the guitar and guitar music such as had never been here before. Time can tell how great was his success, but he stood foremost among the members of his profession, as his name is more widely known than any other American guitarist… He will be sadly missed in musical circles here, and it will be many years before Cleveland possesses another guitarist so gifted, so educated and so able to arouse a love for one of the noblest musical instruments.”

The minstrel show is now often thought of as a vehicle for the banjo, but as is still the rule, musicians tended to play whatever they could get, and promoters tended to employ whatever musicians they could find. In The Music of Black Americans, Eileen Southern writes: “Life in a small [minstrel] company was pretty rough! There might not even be a band, just two or three musicians playing on banjos and guitars. On the day of a show, the manager would take his musicians to the site of the town’s factories or mines to play during the workers’ lunch hour in order to advertise the evening’s show. In small towns, the troupe frequently had to clean the rented hall or schoolhouse or ‘opera house’ where the show was to be presented and to make its own scenery and footlights. After the show, the troupe might have difficulty in finding a place which would accommodate them overnight, particularly in small towns where there were few African Americans. Even in places where there were black residents, it was not easy to obtain lodging, for they were often too poor to provide it. Consequently, the minstrels sometimes found themselves sleeping in the unheated hall where the show had been presented, or in a railroad station.”

Sam Lucas, the most celebrated minstrel in the U.S. in his time, was self-taught on guitar, but was also a ballad singer and actor, the first black man to play the role of Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When minstrelsy faded toward the end of the 19th century, he went into vaudeville, then musicals, and even published collections of his songs.

Yet there seems to have been a change that took place toward the end of the century, perhaps around 1880, when the guitar started to become associated with foreigners, especially Italians.

In many instances, the guitar was depicted as a quaint feature of Italian culture, rather than of music in general. When the Italian liner Nord America collided with a barge near the Statue of Liberty, the Times writer chose to note that the Italians “had taken their shovels, guitars, and mandolins along because, the agent of the [steamship] line explained, ‘They go home when the ground freezes up and return to this country again when it is time for it to thaw out. The shovels they use to dig up the little gardens and farms which most of them have, and the guitars are used in their Christmas and New Year’s festivities, of which they think a great deal.’”

Another Italian-American quaintness was the musical barber shop. Several articles refer to the centuries-old tradition of the barber hanging instruments, especially guitars and mandolins, on the wall of his shop so his customers could strum away while waiting for a shave or a trim. One barber in Brooklyn, his shop suffering lean times in 1907, went a step further and began playing his violin from his doorway to draw customers. It worked so well that he brought in his cousin, another Italian-American barber, this time a guitarist, “And now the two are filling the shop nightly with customers, sometimes playing together and at other times entertaining with violin or guitar alone.”

The barbers were on safe territory: they were playing on their own premises. Once on the street, the Italian-music lover was at the mercy of the Irish cop. Around the turn of the century Antonio Cacalle was arrested for playing “Cavalleria Rusticana” on a guitar, apparently as a serenade for someone in a house nearby, but a small crowd gathered to hear him. He was arrested for “collecting a crowd and otherwise violating the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” but discharged by the magistrate, who said, “People will be arrested next thing for whistling in the street.”

Here, the magistrate put his finger on something important; the fact that some cultures make music indoors, more or less in private, while others do it, as John Lennon said, “in the road.” This was a distinction understood quite clearly by an importer in Union Square. Domestic woods from Northern Michigan or Minnesota, he told the newspaper, are best for mandolins and guitars to be played in the U.S., presumably because they resist drying. In Spanish and Italian-made instruments “the wood chips or cracks, and the cheaper grades become useless after a few weeks. Then the angry customers come around and take it out of me. In Spain and Italy mandolins and guitars are usually played out of doors and not in overheated flats and houses.”

In turn-of-the-century America, though, music was different. Bands playing Sousa in the park were one thing; young foreigners playing guitars on the sidewalks were quite another. The guitar became a symbol of (and scapegoat for) certain foreign behavior that was not to be encouraged. Despite the precedent set by Cacalle, at least one young Italian was locked up for serenading his sweetheart from the street, an act considered disorderly conduct. And when a young Neapolitan in the Bronx serenaded several passing women, he was sentenced to 20 days in the workhouse.

This Latin flavor seems to have made Victorian-era Americans uneasy about the guitar. It seemed… well, unmanly. Unrugged. Latin. In 1878, the Times reprinted an article from the , Cornhill magazine of London on “The Guitar in Portugal,” which begins, “The guitar is certainly, to our critical Northern eyes, an effeminate instrument, and a man who plays upon it in an English drawing-room can no more hope to preserve any appearance of manly dignity than if he were piping upon a flageolet, or blowing into that most ludicrous of all instruments – the flute.”

By the end of the century, a series of volleys was ringing back and forth in the pages of the Times between male writers berating the guitar for sissiness and women writers telling the guys that they had no idea what women really like. Here’s a novelist who catches exactly the woman’s view of the romantic man late in the 19th century; “Jack Walthall… was tall and strong and handsome, with pale classic features, jet-black curling hair, and beautiful white hands that never knew what labor was. He was something of a dandy in Hillsborough, but in a large, manly way. With his perfect manners, stately and stiff, or genial and engaging, as occasion might demand, Mr. Walthall was just such a romantic figure as one reads about in books, or as one expects to see step from behind the wings of the stage with a guitar or a long dagger.”

All this praise by women was too much for some to take, though, and the guitar, despite the way it was actually being used in the great American heartland, started to become something of a symbol for effeminacy. In his poem “The Guitar and the Drum,” one B. Wolcott of Company B of the Tenth Illinois describes a young soldier with his old guitar, “Old and battered and dusty/A veteran covered with scars/Yet to me the most precious of treasures/The sweetest of all guitars/For a gentle spirit dwells in it/That speaks through the trembling strings/And in echo to my thrumming/A wonderful melody sings.”

But the onset of war makes him realize that “’Tis no time now for idle strumming/Of light guitars: in that loud drumming/Is fearful meaning; the hour is coming/That for some of us will be the summing/Of all life’s preparation.”

The poem ends with the young soldier dying, and guitar and drum stand as the two poles between which his life has been moved. Another writer, quoting the poem, though, has no such tragic view. He editorializes: “How many a young heart has, in these later days, been turned from soft guitar-tones of idleness, to the brave, rattling measures of drum-life! It will do good, this war of ours; and many a brave fellow will, in after years, look back upon it as the school in which he first learned to be a thoroughly practical and sensible man.” Albeit a dead one.

One aspect of the guitar was, apparently, exclusively male: guitarmaking.

At the beginning of the century, many instruments were imported – C.F. Martin started out in the U.S. not as a guitar maker, but as an importer of musical instruments of all kinds. But over the years, more and more guitars were made in the U.S.

All kinds of men, skilled and less-skilled, made guitars. In a pioneer age when people made their own tools and furniture, an unknown number made their own musical instruments, too, not all of which would have been of bottom-of-the-line cigar-box quality. Many Americans, especially in rural areas, were making their own guitars well into the 20th century.

As for professional instrument builders, Christine Ayars’ Contributions to the Art of Music in America by the Music Industries of Boston, 1640-1936 lists more than a dozen makers in 19th-century Boston alone.

Some made a handful of instruments, working at home. Some were high-profile luthiers, such as Charles Stumcka (who began work around 1842), Pehr Anderberg (circa 1880) who supervised the manufacturing of “Haynes Excelsior,” “Tilton,” and “Bay State” guitars and “Bay State” mandolins for John C. Haynes & Co., Vega (1881) who made guitars and mandolins before they made banjos, and Charles Stromberg (1887), whose company would go on to make some of the most sought-after archtop guitars.

Some worked alone but nevertheless provided a full-service operation, like John A. Palm (active in Boston 1897-1904), a Swede “and one of the best mandolin and guitar makers in Boston.” His ads covered it all: “Makers of high grade mandolins and guitars – violins, zithers, banjos, strings, and findings at lowest prices. Music instruction books. Repairing promptly attended to.”

The Anderberg family alone illustrates how much variety existed. Pehr A. Anderberg started out making guitars in Mt. Vernon, New York, around 1870, then moved to Boston to supervise the making of several lines of guitars (and mandolins) for Haynes. His son, Ernest, worked for Haynes, while his father was there. When Pehr went into business for himself, Ernest went with him. “Then he was with the Snedeker Company of Winchester, Indiana, after which he went to Philadelphia to start making guitars and mandolins in a small way for George Bauer, who owned a music store there…”

So there you have it: luthiers worked on their own, for their families, for small and large manufacturers and for music stores, who employed repairmen – and those repairmen, as is still the case today, made their own guitars on the side.

And it’s a sign of the guitar’s popularity that a surprising number of inventors thought there would be money in building a better guitar.

The “New Patents” section of Scientific American reports countless “improvements” in the guitar, some by well-known and successful guitarmakers such as William Tilton of New York, and James Ashborn of Wolcottville, Connecticut, others by any number of forgotten tinkerers. One invention used a guitar as an amplifier to create a “Singing Telephone for Schools,” claiming “The apparatus transmits musical sounds any distance and with undiminished power, and can be used for transmitting the singing tones of voices and instruments.”

The famous scientist Michael Faraday demonstrated that if you connect a piano on one floor of a building by means of a rod running through a hole in the floor to a guitar on the floor above, and then play a note on the piano, “the sound seemed to issue from the guitar as loudly as if the instrument were in the room, but the instant the connection was broken between the rod and the guitar, no note could be heard.”

Scientific American reported in 1852 that all kinds of instruments were being made of Gum Elastic. “It is said that not only flutes are made of India rubber, but canes, violins, and guitars! Indeed, by some new process the material is made so hard that it is difficult to find tools with which to work it.” This seems to prefigure Maccaferri’s plastic ukuleles and guitars, and, perhaps, Ovation.

No survey of guitar players of that age would be complete, though, without going beyond women and men into the less-expected realm of ghosts and animals.

The late 19th century was the age of spiritualism, and spirits and mediums seemed to have a particular fascination with guitars. A famous medium (from the early 20th century, actually) ostensibly made spirit hands play a guitar on stage, and in rebuttal, a magician, a forerunner of the Amazing Randi, claimed to debunk the medium by achieving the same end through stagecraft. A “small guitar,” reports the Times, placed on a table, is “played upon as it is seen to float about.”

Yes, ladies and gents, there’s no end to the bizarre company that the guitar kept. It even turned up in an obituary for a trained pig.

“Burry, the lion, killed Strenuous Lifer, the pig, in Luna Park, Coney Island, yesterday afternoon,” reported the Times. “It happened because the trainer tried to hurry the pig act on too soon, and the pigs coming in met the lion going out of the cage. The late pig is said to have been worth $700.

“Strenuous Lifer was a wonderful pig. He could sit down at a table, with a napkin around his neck, and eat a full meal, from soup to cheese, without soiling the linen. He had many other tricks, such as playing on a guitar and sleeping under a coverlet.”

Read Part One: The Guitar in Non-Anglo America and Part Three: Women.

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Tim Brookes is director of the writing program at Champlain College and the author of Guitar: An American Life, published by Grove Atlantic Press.

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This article originally appeared in VG‘s Dec 2005 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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Ed. Note: In the final installment in his series on the guitar in 19-century America, Tim Brookes offers a study of several women who played the guitar, and what the instrument meant to them. The first two parts are at Part One: The Guitar in Non-Anglo America and Part Two: Man and Machine.

“The guitar before 1850 was a much smaller and more delicate instrument than the classical guitar known today,” wrote one scholar. “It was strung with six gut strings which provide a delicate yet surprisingly resonant sound. It may not be too far fetched to suggest that the physical instrument of the time reflected the prevailing conception of women: soft, quiet, delicate, unobtrusive, yet always ready to accompany or entertain with a minimum of fuss.”

Now that we’ve established that the guitar was not limited to the parlor (as addressed in part one of this series, July ’05) nor to women (December ’05), let’s consider how women did use the guitar in 19th-century America, and what the instrument meant to them.

In one respect, the guitar was actually more popular in the 19th century than it is today; it was a central part of a well-rounded education, especially for a well-born young lady.

Despite – or perhaps because of – its reputation as an instrument of romance, the guitar had been seen for 250 years as one of the instruments, like the lute and the virginals and later the piano, that were to be expected as among the accomplishments of a young lady of birth and fortune, perhaps as a means of attracting a good husband and pleasing him thereafter. That’s not so say that young men didn’t also play the guitar as part of courtship – both sexes played, just as both were expected to know how to dance well.

From the 18th century onward, we can read of picnics and parties, soriees and excursions on boats and in canoes, with the guitar tinkling in the background or being strummed as individuals joined each other in song. But insofar as young women were more consciously and deliberately trained for successful courtship than men, so the guitar turns up in their teenage syllabus. As early as 1788, Horatio Garnet was advertising in the New Hampshire Spy that, having received his musical education in some of the principal cities of Europe, he now proposes “teaching the Violin, Bass-viol, Hautboy, Clarionet, Flute, etc, and also to give Lessons to Ladies on the Guitar…”

By the 19th century, the guitar has settled into the school curriculum. Mecklenburg Female College, for example, included “Music on Piano or Guitar, 32 lessons in 13 weeks, $20.00.” By the end of the century, guitar lessons were being offered by the New York YWCA, and even by correspondence – surely a hard row to hoe.

Having learned the guitar (or piano), a young woman might also play to entertain visitors to the home, or to entertain her husband once she was married – and her husband might well accompany her on another instrument, such as the fiddle or flute.

When Millard Fillmore was elected president in 1850, a guitar went to the White House with him. (Others may well have been there before. Washington and Jefferson both had female relatives who played, and Ben Franklin is known to have tried the time-honored ploy of offering to teach a young lady to play the guitar.) A friend wrote, “When Mr. Fillmore entered the White House, he found it entirely destitute of books. Mrs. Fillmore was in the habit of spending her leisure moments in reading, I might almost say, in studying. She was accustomed to be surrounded with books of reference, maps, and all the other requirements of a well-furnished library, and she found it difficult to content herself in a house devoid of such attractions. To meet this want, Mr. Fillmore asked of Congress, and received an appropriation, and selected a library, devoting to that purpose a large and pleasant room in the second story of the White House. Here, Mrs. Fillmore surrounded herself with her little home comforts; here her daughter had her own piano, harp, and guitar, and here Mrs. Fillmore received the informal visits of the friends she loved, and, for her, the real pleasure and enjoyments of the White House were in this room.”

In those last 15 words one can sense that the guitar often meant something profound to its owner. It might look to an outsider like just a “little home comfort,” but it is part of a stable, civilized, stimulating, reflective home, important to both a social and an inner life. The guitar is a meditation device; it has the ability to calm and center the player, to provide a quiet inner space, and this deeper value is hinted at or stated explicitly throughout the century…

…Especially during the Civil War, which shattered the living-rooms and the courtship behaviors of the genteel South. Time and again the guitar crops up in memoirs as the instrument of peace and solace, often symbolically placed in contradiction to the gun, as in the diary of Kate Carney: “May 30th 1861. One of Bro. Wilson’s negro men got very badly hurt with a mule today. Mended Sister’s hoop skirt. Finished The Virginians, read some papers and a magazine, practiced on my guitar, and this evening practiced shooting with Sister’s pistol.”

When this stable way of life was destroyed, the guitar changed meaning; late in the century, women in their autumn years often speak of it as their “old” guitar; it is charged with the sadness of everything they have lost.

In other areas of the country, and in other strata of society, women used the guitar in different ways. Many women, like many men, were porch/parlor/kitchen guitarists, whether they were wealthy or not. Women in Hispanic families often played guitar, and taught their children. In Appalachia, Merle Travis learned his thumbpicking style from Mose Rager, who learned it from Kennedy Jones, who always said that he learned it from his mother, Alice DeArmond Jones. Maybelle Carter was a 20th-century descendant of this tradition.

Others went beyond being social entertainers to being semi-professional or even professional entertainers. By the end of the century, several women guitarists were playing concerts; others were playing dances.

“I started playing when I was so young I used to play with dolls at home. This was about 1888,” recalled Mrs. Charley Huyck (b. 1875) of Lincoln, Nebraska, who had played piano, guitar, and mandolin at square dances for 50 years.

“We played in many a fine home in Lincoln for their private dances. These were held in the attic or on the third floor of those big houses. Square dances, polka waltzes, schottisches, and lancers were the popular dances. We used to haul a parlor organ in the spring wagon as most places had no organ or piano at that time.

“…It was the custom to have a big dance in the hayloft whenever a new barn was built. This was a way of dedicating a new barn, and they were big affairs. The hayloft would be lighted with… lanterns… or hanging lamps, and these were pretty gay occasions.

“Everybody would climb up the loft ladder, even if they had to crawl over a few horses or cows to get to it. The crowd was always full of life and they sure could dance. There was no snobbery and everyone was friendly, no ‘cliquety’ people who would keep to themselves.

“The square dance was a very democratic gathering… Men and boys came dressed in overalls, swallow-tail coats, peg-top pants, or tight-fitting pants, derby hats; caps, and some wore an assortment which was a sight in itself. The women and girls wore bustles, some hoop skirts, tight-fitting basques, and hair ornaments… The young folks and the old folks mingled freely together. Often when the sets were on the floor, dancing, both young and old, even some of the granddaddies who were not in any of the sets would get out to the side and dance a lively hoe down or clog. I have played at dances where five or six small children would be sleeping on a pile of the dancers’ coats and wraps in a corner of the hall.”

Yet there’s a great danger in following this line of thought too literally because it leads to the assumption that a performer, or an instrument, are important only if they are “successful,” and they are successful only if they are playing for money. Or worse, that they are only successful if they have been recorded.

This is the core of the issue, ladies and gents; the 19th century was an era of live music. In fact, it was the last era of live music. It wasn’t just that the young woman was expected to play because music was a womanly occupation; it was that everyone was expected to play – to play something, no matter how basic the skill or the instrument, or to sing along with others who had more instrumental training. People didn’t listen to music – they made music.

Even before the end of the 19th century, the era of live music, which had been going on since the first musical sound, was doomed. The first recording devices (including the player piano) had been invented, and music was changing from a fleeting, magical experience created collectively by musicians and listeners, to a passive experience. The music business, which had begun with the manufacture and sale of sheet music, was turning music into a commodity, owned and manipulated largely by non-musicians. Hardly surprising, then, that Americans’ notions of what is important and successful were also changing.

This fact has led to widespread prejudice against the 19th-century guitar – but also against 19th-century women guitarists. As one scholar wrote, “Women did not play concerts; thus the superficial level at which music was learned was both reasonable and practical for the role it was intended.”

But in fact very few people played concerts in the modern sense – though everyone played concerts in the 19th-century sense. The division between the performer and the audience was nothing like it is now, and the cult of the professional had barely been born.The more one reads these assumptions about women and the guitar, the more it seems as if there’s something unspoken behind the false equations; it’s as if women were responsible for keeping the guitar down, both by playing at a mediocre level and by keeping it at home, as if the guitar were an adventurous teenager who wanted to see the world but was tied to his mother’s apron strings. There’s even an implicit criticism that the parlor guitar remained small because it suited a women’s reach and her short fingers.

As we’ve seen, and as I’ve said before, this is a load of bollocks. Not a single word of it is true, but on top of every other explicit or implied insult, it insults the parlor as a place for making music, and as a musical tradition.

The musicologist Edith Boroff responds to this criticism with a resounding raspberry. In an article entitled “An American Parlor at the Turn of the Century” she dares to swim against a current that has been running with increasing force throughout the 20th century, and argues that the very absence of celebrity – or, if you like, the relatively domestic, humble and egalitarian activity of making music in the home – was a wonderful thing.

One musicologist, she begins, has described parlor music as “designed to be performed by and listened to by persons of limited musical training and ability.” That may be true to some extent, she concedes, but it misses a broader and perhaps more important point: parlor music was live music, and it kept the vital meeting and exchange of music alive.

“My grandmother established a musical parlor in Chicago as soon as she married and moved there in the 1880s. She was no musician, but she invited musicians daily to her home; the children were present, even as babies, and they became participants in due course.

“The parlor musicale was not a concert. A concert is a parenthetical one-shot event; a parlor was a continuing social institution… The parlor musicale was a part of one’s life, an activity that went on 200 or 300 times a year, or even, as in my grandmother’s case, more like 365 times a year. A family with this interest – and there were many – played and listened to music as often as we watch television today…

“Whoever could make music made it. This included household members and guests, and it most especially included the children, who listened regularly from birth (and before), and who performed when they were able. It was considered bad manners ever to refuse or to make excuses…”

It’s perhaps a sign of the times, or of the fact that her grandmother’s household was a sophisticated urban one, that she doesn’t mention hearing guitars, which had fallen out of middle-class fashion. But the repertoire was by no means narrow, staid, or mediocre; “I remember my mother’s older brother singing wonderful Vaudeville songs to the ukulele, acting such chestnuts as ‘Oh Lord, If You Won’t Help Me for Heaven’s Sake Don’t Help That Bear.’ I remember hearing my mother’s cousin playing his marvelous arrangements of popular songs on the banjo, my eyes popping as he whipped around that fingerboard – he was the best banjo picker I ever heard. And another of her cousins who played the flute dazzled me with Debussy’s ‘Syrinx,’ and then tore through her arrangement of Leroy Anderson’s ‘Fiddle-Faddle,’ calling it ‘Piccolo-Paccolo.’”

To us, the parlor embraced an extraordinary and unpredictable variety of music. It was an active, participant tradition, as opposed to passive listening to radio or recordings. It wasn’t produced for the profit of a flour company or a tire company or a life insurance company. It wasn’t organized by a instrument company or publishing company trying to sell more instruments or records or sheet music.

Above all, Boroff writes (and this was probably true of parlor music in less affluent and more rural households, too), it was egalitarian.

“[W]omen were equal with men, American music was equal with European, and fanciful performance was equal with literal performance.”

The parlor, though, was almost the last flourish of live, unamplified, unmediated, uncommercial music. The 20th century was upon it, and soon anything as unplugged and as full of the erratic human joy of the musical spirit would seem terminally square.

Read Part One: The Guitar in Non-Anglo America and Part Two: Man and Machine.

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Tim Brookes is director of the writing program at Champlain College and the author of Guitar: An American Life, published by Grove Atlantic Press.

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This article originally appeared in VG‘s May 2005 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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Ed. Note: In this series, Tim Brookes attacks the common argument that the guitar in 19th-century America was small, quiet, and suitable only for young middle-class ladies playing in parlors. Part one explores what was arguably the most extensive and skillful guitar culture of the day – the generally forgotten guitar in non-English-speaking communities. The remainder of the series can be read at Part Two: Man and Machine and Part Three: Women.

“Over the last century,” began a recent guitar history, parroting conventional wisdom, “The guitar has evolved from a parlor instrument for young urban ladies.”

Of all the insults the guitar has had to put up with over the last 500 years, the most common and most infuriating is that during the 19th century, the guitar in America was nothing more than a parlor instrument for young urban ladies.

This is, as John Lydon might say, a load of bollocks. It wasn’t only a ladies’ instrument, it wasn’t only a parlor instrument, and even when it was a ladies’ parlor instrument, both the instrument and the parlor were much more complex and interesting than they’ve been made to appear.

The 19th century was, in fact, a fascinating time for the guitar in America, and while many a music writer has blandly described the 19th-century guitar as a small, quiet, dull instrument that didn’t find its voice or place in the global spotlight until the technical improvements that attended it in the 20th century, the opposite may be true – that in certain crucial respects, the 19th century was the guitar’s last hurrah.

Let’s start with one largely unacknowledged respect in which the “parlor instrument for young urban ladies” insult is completely out of whack: it’s an Anglocentric point of view. The colonists arriving from the British Isles weren’t the best guitarists in the New World. They also weren’t the most numerous, or even the first. The first identifiable guitarist in the New World was Spanish.

His name was Juan Garcia y Talvarea, and he was part of the garrison in St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied settlement on the land we now call the U.S., located on Florida’s northern coast. We don’t know anything about him except that he died circa 1576, and among the possessions he left behind was a guitar.

What did Juan Garcia y Talvarea’s guitar look like? It’s hard to know for sure, because not a single example of the 16th-century guitar has survived, and chances are that different makers made different variants: there has never been such a thing as a standard guitar. It was almost certainly a figure-eight-shaped instrument with four courses (pairs) of strings, and very small by today’s standards, perhaps 1/3 the size of a modern classical guitar, with as few as seven frets up the neck. And frets were not yet made of metal wire, but short pieces of gut string tied around the neck, like on a lute. The guitar might have been tuned in the old Spanish tuning of F below middle C, middle C, E and A or the newer tuning, with the F tuned up to a G, but any tuning would have been approximate, as there was no way of establishing perfect pitch, especially in a military encampment in the New World.

Y Talvarea probably played the same repertoire the folk guitar still plays – ballads, love songs, comic songs, complaints – though if he was among the musicians who played for Aviles on ceremonial occasions, he might have taken part in more complex instrumental works involving counterpoint. He probably also strummed dance music, perhaps playing with the harpist, for we hear elsewhere that the Spanish soldiers took guitars and harps with them as folk instruments. The garrison at St. Augustine must have needed all the social energizing it could get, being 3,000 miles from home.

Florida, after periods of belonging to the British and the French, remained Spanish until 1821, and it seems to have enjoyed the typically festive Spanish-style open-air use of the guitar. History describes the scene during a carnival early in the 19th century, “Masques, dominoes, harlequins, Punchinellos, and a great variety of grotesque disguises, on horseback, in cars, gigs and on foot, paraded the streets with guitars, violins and other instruments; and in the evenings, the houses were open to receive masks, and balls were given in every direction.” At the end of a day of festivities to celebrate the coronation of Charles IV as king of Spain, a formal minuet was held, “But as the evening grew cooler and spirits gayer, the violin was replaced by the guitar and livelier contredances occupied the floor…”

This guitar-driven dance is much more Spanish than British. In Anglophone America, the British colonists seem to have used the guitar in small domestic settings and in concert, rather than in larger social settings and in social rituals such as weddings and religious services. To overstate the case, to Anglo-Americans the guitar was an instrument rather than a way of life.

Florida, though, gives only a hint of the richness and breadth of the guitar’s flourishing in the Spanish New World. The Southwest was settled by Spanish moving up from Mexico, and the guitar was so much part of their lives that even before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, guitar strings could be bought on the Camino Real between Mexico City and Santa Fe.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the guitar moved northward into the upper reaches of Mexico – in other words, into the land we now call New Mexico, Texas, Baja California, and Arizona. It was used for dances and social ceremonies; it was even used by priests in missions that were too remote to have an organ. Indians picked it up with notable speed and skill.

Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, and declared Alta (Upper) California a province of Mexico. Between then and 1848, Spanish Californian life flourished in what is often regarded as a Golden Age. Noted 19th-century California shipbuilder William Heath Davis wrote, “Many of the women played the guitar skillfully, and the young men the violin. In almost every family there were one or more musicians, and everywhere, music was a familiar sound.

“Throughout California, feast days, rodeos, weddings, funerals, and other special occasions were accented by music, and events were preceded or followed by a fandango or a baile.”

The guitar was, as in many Hispanic cultures, an indispensable feature of life for men and women of every class. In rural areas it might be a folk instrument, but elsewhere it might equally be played in the classical tradition to the highest levels of accomplishment.

Most of the printed music (and probably some of the instruments) used by the more trained musicians would have come up from Mexico City, but Mexico was by no means a cultural desert. The musicologist John Koegel writes that more than 1,000 symphonies, sextets, string quartets and trios, mixed quartets, duets, sonatas, concertos, serenades, individual pieces for different instruments (especially guitar, cello, piano, flute, and violin), and vocal music selections have been found in a Mexico City collection dating to 1801, including not only Spanish and Mexican works, but works by major European composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Stamitz, Gossec, Pleyel, Dittersdorf, Dussek, Hoffmeister, Abel, Johann Christian Bach, Pergolesi, Boccherini, Gretry, Devienne, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Clementi, and Lolli.

It wasn’t only music that was available. Booksellers, Koegel writes, sold all sorts of musical goods in colonial Mexico. One shop’s inventory consisted of 111 violins, six flutes, two oboes, four horns, one German clave horgano, one small organ, two barrel organs, two dulsainas biejas, and a number of stringed instruments, including all kinds of forgotten and surviving members of the guitar family. Mexico City was the music capital of the New World.

Everything was changed by the 1848 Gold Rush and the influx of 100,000 Anglo-Americans that accompanied and followed it.

At first, many of the Anglo Easterners visiting California write about seeing Spanish culture for the first time, and their reactions are fascinating. There’s a marked difference between the rough-and-ready appearance and behavior of the miners, and the civilized demeanor of the Spanish:

“Among the fresh arrivals at the diggings the native Californians have begun to appear in tolerable numbers,” wrote Edwin Bryant. “Many of these people have brought their wives, who are attended usually by Indian girls. The graceful Spanish costume of the newcomers adds quite a feature to the busy scene around. There, working amidst the sallow Yankees, with their wide white trousers and straw hats, and the half-naked Indian, may be seen the native-born Californian, with his dusky visage and lustrous black eye, clad in the universal short tight jacket with its lace adornments, and velvet breeches, with a silk sash fastened round his waist, splashing away with his gay deerskin botas in the mudded water.

“Since these arrivals, almost every evening a fandango is got up on the green, before some of the tents… It is quite a treat, after a hard day’s work, to go at nightfall to one of these fandangos. The merry notes of the guitar and the violin announce them to all comers; and a motley enough looking crowd, every member of which is puffing away at a cigar, forms an applauding circle round the dancers, who smoke like the rest. One cannot help being struck by the picturesque costumes and graceful motions of the performers, who appear to dance not only with their legs, but with all their hearts and souls. Lacosse is a particular admirer of these fandangos, and he very frequently takes a part in them himself. During the interval between the dances, coffee is consumed by the senoras, and coffee with something stronger by the senors; so that, as the night advances, the merriment gets, if not ‘fast and furious,’ at least animated and imposing.”

Many of the new arrivals were struck by the democratic spirit of the dances. “It was not uncommon or surprising to see the most elaborately dressed and aristocratic woman at the ball dancing with a peon dressed only in his shirt and trousers open from the hip down, with wide and full drawers underneath, and frequently barefoot,” wrote trader Josiah Webb in 1844.

Above all, there are signs that this is a musically developed and sophisticated culture, with a wide range of music played well. This is San Francisco in 1850:
“[A] quintette of Mexican musicians… came here at night to perform. There were two harps, one large and the other very small, two guitars, and one flute. The musicians were dressed in the Mexican costume (which, however, was nothing very noticeable at that time, as many of their auditors were in the same style of dress), and were quiet, modest looking men, with contented, amiable faces. They used to walk in among the throng of people, along to the upper end of the room, take their seats, and with scarcely any preamble or discussion, commence their instrumentation. They had played so much together, and were so similar, seemingly, in disposition – calm, confident and happy – that their 10 hands moved as if guided by one mind; rising and falling in perfect unison – the harmony so sweet, and just strange enough in its tones, from the novelty in the selection of instruments, to give it a peculiar fascination for ears always accustomed to the orthodox and time-honored vehicles of music used in quintette instrumentation.”

The flood of Anglos and the steady change from a settled agraian society to a pell-mell frontier society threw off the established social and musical rhythms. The Californian Spanish were pushed into progressively poorer and more isolated areas. In town, these would become barrios; in the country, villages like Las Uvas, which turn-of-the-century writer Mary Austin, noted for her writings on the area, describes in The Land of Little Rain.

“At Las Uvas, they keep up all the good customs brought out of Old Mexico or bred in a lotus-eating land; drink, and are merry and look out for something to eat afterward; have children, nine or 10 to a family, have cockfights, keep the siesta, smoke cigarettes, and wait for the sun to go down. And always they dance; at dusk on the smooth adobe floors, afternoons under the trellises where the earth is damp and has a fruity smell. A betrothal, a wedding, or a christening, or the mere proximity of a guitar is sufficient occasion; and if the occasion lacks, send for the guitar and dance anyway.”

For every sympathetic Mary Austin, though, there’s a William Heath Davis, ready to look down his nose.

“The families of the wealthier classes had more or less education,” he wrote. “Their contact with the foreign population was an advantage to them in this respect. There were no established schools outside the Missions, and what little education the young people obtained, they picked up in the family, learning to read and write among themselves. They seemed to have a talent and taste for music. Many of the women played the guitar skillfully, and the young men the violin. Of course, they had no scientific and technical musical instruction.”

It’s that last sentence that reeks of the smug snobbery of the Victorian Easterner. It’s hardly surprising, then, to read that as soon as the newcomers reach a critical mass, the guitar is pushed aside by the instrument that best embodied “scientific and technical” music: “On our return, we stopped at Don José’s house in town to lunch, where we were most hospitably entertained,” wrote the Rev. William Ingraham Kip. “His daughter played some pieces on the piano for us, with great taste and skill. As American habits creep in, this instrument is, in many California houses, taking the place of the guitar, whose music they inherited from their Spanish ancestors.”

What we’re seeing is a form of low-level cultural genocide, in which the guitar is a kind of metaphor: so many features of Spanish California life that delighted the new arrivals would be rudely elbowed aside, spoken of with disdain, and marginalized.

The remnants of Old Spanish culture became increasingly marginal, but not extinct, and they were “rediscovered” before the end of the century by Charles F. Lummis, a writer, folk song collector and guitarist, who crossed the country on foot from Massachusetts in the mid 1880s. He wrote that life in California “before the gringo” had been “the happiest, the humanest, the most beautiful life that Caucasians have ever lived anywhere under the sun.” He collected songs in the high desert of what is now New Mexico, “squatting with the quiet Mexican herders in the little semi-circular brush shelter by a crackling fire of juniper,” hearing “an invariable sense of time and rhythm which only our best musicians can match. And they were such human, friendly folk! Glad to sing a song over and over until I had it note-perfect, and then to repeat the words while I wrote them down… So we sang and talked and smoked cigarettes under the infinite stars of a New Mexican sky or the even more numerous flakes of a mountain snowstorm.”

The French had also brought guitars to the New World. The Rev. J.W. Adams of Syracuse references crossing the St. Lawrence River and moving down from present-day Canada with a guitar, bound for a Jesuit colony founded in 1655 at Onadaga. The colony prospered, the account says, for nearly two years until, “At length, a conspiracy which extended itself through the Iroquois cantons was formed against them.” Sieur Dupuys, an officer who had brought the mission from Quebec, decided to retreat to Canada, the Rev. Adams writes, but the settlers needed to build canoes and make their escape without arousing the suspicions of the Iroquois, “And this they accomplished by a stratagem singular enough.”

“Singular enough” sums the story up pretty well. In the midst of various flummery involving prophetic dreams, family obligations and whatnot, the French invite all the Indians to a feast, and while they’re eating, the settlers secretly load up their bateaux, ready for a swift departure. A young Frenchman then produces a guitar and begins playing to the Indians. It must have been an early New Age piece in DADGAD tuning, because “In less than quarter of an hour every Indian was laid soundly to sleep. The young Frenchman immediately sallied forth to join his companions, who were ready at the instant to push from the shore.”

As if this weren’t unlikely enough, the Indians wake up the following morning and spend all day wondering why all the French houses are shut and locked. Eventually, at eveningfall, they break in and “to their utter astonishment found every house empty.”

This story is preposterous in so many respects it’s hard to have much confidence in it – but for the fact that the guitar was all the rage in France at that time. Before his death in 1643, Louis XIII was such a keen player that the guitar was used in chamber recitals and ballets at court. One painting/engraving shows a procession of guitarists walking onstage, two abreast, to perform during a ballet – and one of the musicians is thought to be the King himself. The young Louis XIV was taught by the great Italian guitarist Francisco Corbetta, and became as avid a player as his father. In fact, Voltaire observed caustically that the only things Louis ever learned were to dance and play the guitar, and it has been suggested that Corbetta had been invited by Cardinal Mazarin so that young Louis would become so addicted to the guitar that he would never become interested in politics, and leave the running of the country to Mazarin.

The Guitar as Political Tool
In the New World, the French established a series of settlements from Detroit (1701) down river to New Orleans (1718) and Baton Rouge (1720), as well as Biloxi (1699) and Mobile (1711) on the Gulf of Mexico. Individual settlements in 19th-century America were often almost entirely inhabited by one nationality, so it’s not surprising that when G.W. Featherstonhaugh, exploring the upper Midwest before mid-century, should talk of visiting “French” villages. He wrote:

“It was 3 p.m. before I reached St. Geneviève, and upon returning to my old quarters, I found that both the master and mistress of the house had gone on a visit to Kaskaskias, an old French settlement in Illinois, but had left word that I was to consider myself at home… Having further refreshed myself with a comfortable cup of tea, I strolled out into the village.

“How different the tranquil existence of this primitive French village from the busy excitement of a populous city! At 9 p.m. there was not a soul to be met in the streets; here and there the chords of a guitar, accompanied by a French voice, agreeably interrupted the general silence, whilst the only tread that was audible was that of cows slowly moving up and down the streets…”

So this was the guitar in much of America in the first half of the 19th century: played by men and women, rich and poor, indoors and out, alone or in company.

And if someone were singing to the guitar, they might have been singing in English, French, German, Italian (though that would have been more likely after the great Italian immigrations of the 1880s and later), or Portuguese (though that would have been more likely in the whaling towns of New England and the cannery towns of California, as Portuguese from the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands were highly prized seamen). Most likely, though, it was Spanish, and it’s one of the great tragedies in the history of the guitar that the Spanish-American guitar tradition withered and died almost without trace.

Read Part Two: Man and Machine and Part Three: Women.

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Tim Brookes is a guitarist and the author of Guitar: An American Life, published by Grove Atlantic Press. The book tells two stories: the history of the guitar on the North American continent and the history of one custom guitar being built from scratch by master luthier Rick Davis in Vermont.

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This article originally appeared in VG Jul. 2005 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

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