The Guitar in America: Victorian Era to Jazz Age (review)

Historians of the guitar's career in the U.S. have tended to emphasize the instrument's association with folk and popular idioms, and to portray it as a tool of resistance against mainstream values and elite musical tastes. In his book, The Guitar in America, Jeffrey Noonan argues that such portrayals ignore significant aspects of the guitar's cultural history. Using the largely unstudied publications of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century Banjo, Mandolin and Guitar (BMG) movement as his primary sources, Noonan seeks to reconstruct an extended moment in American music history when the guitar rose to prominence as part of a cultivated rather than a vernacular musical world. According to Noonan, magazines such as S.S. Stewart's Banjo & Guitar Journal (1882-1903), Cadenza (1894-1924), and Crescendo (1908-1934) "confirm that during the BMG era the guitar was a middle-class instrument used to instill and reinforce the cultural and musical values of America's mainstream" (22). In the context of the BMG movement, guitar music circulated via musical notation rather than aural transmission, and aspirations towards musical refinement and cultural elevation existed alongside a commitment to commercial enterprise and entrepreneurship.

Through his careful reading of BMG periodicals, Noonan recovers the careers of instrument makers, pedagogues and performers long buried beneath the more widely celebrated aspects of the guitar's history. Especially notable is his account of William Foden and Vahdah Olcott-Bickford, the most esteemed American guitar virtuosi of the early twentieth century. That Olcott-Bickford achieved such prominence as a female player and advocate of guitar artistry suggests that the guitar's long-recognized association with masculinity was not so overarching at the time of the BMG movement's ascendance as it was to become in later years; although Noonan also shows that stereotyped gender imagery was often used to promote the guitar through BMG publications.

Equally important is Noonan's discussion of changes in guitar design during the period in question. According to Noonan, the most significant innovation in guitar design in the early twentieth century—the creation of the arch-top guitar—was the direct outgrowth of a larger trend towards the creation of hybrid instruments in which aspects of mandolin and guitar design fused together. Given that the first successful electric guitar model, Gibson's ES-150—first issued in the mid-1930s—was effectively an arch-top with a pickup attached, Noonan credibly asserts that, "in some ways the addition of electricity was merely icing on the cake … the physical and technical roots of the new American guitar were planted firmly in the BMG movement's promotion of the mandolin family" (136).

The Guitar in America does not tell as sweeping a story of the instrument as its title might suggest. The period studied by Noonan was also the time that saw the rise of blues guitar, Hawaiian slack key, and many other major developments that are mere background in this account. Nonetheless, Noonan has done readers interested in the guitar and the cultural history of American music a great service by recovering this little recognized moment when string instruments assumed a unique currency in the U.S.