Guitar

Assembled from 18 blocks · 2 evidence · 24 related

1. Story
2. The fretted, flat-backed, waisted plucked instrument that descends on one side from the lute family and became, in the twentieth century, the vehicle on which almost every strand in this Journey travelled. Its European ancestry runs through the Iberian vihuela and the four- and five-course Renaissance and Baroque guitars to the six-string instrument standardised in the nineteenth century; a flat back replaces the lute's ribbed bowl, which makes the instrument far cheaper to build and far more tolerant of humidity and rough handling. Those two properties are why it, rather than the lute, went aboard ships. Cheap factory and mail-order guitars reached the American South in quantity around the turn of the twentieth century and became the standard blues instrument; Portuguese-built guitars carried on European vessels reached the West African coast and were taken up by Kru seamen; and in both places players applied to it techniques that had been developed on something else — the sliding metal or bottleneck stop in the Mississippi Delta, the two-finger picking of the Akan seperewa harp-lute on the Gold Coast. The guitar is not the origin of any tradition here. It is the common carrier that made several of them audible to each other.
3. Knowledge
4. European lute
5. Guitar
6. Connections
7. European lute
8. Blues
9. Highlife
10. W. C. Handy hears a guitarist at Tutwiler station
11. The Kumasi Trio record in London
12. Banjo
13. Oud
14. Guitar
15. A European lute is depicted in the Libro de los juegos
16. Evidence
17. The medieval European lute descends from the gut-strung Arabian oud, takes its name from the Arabic al-ʿūd, cannot be distinguished from the ʿūd in Western iconography until about the thirteenth century, and appears in the Libro de los juegos commissioned by Alfonso X and completed c. 1283; European players added frets. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary with the substance attributed to this Met essay; the essay page itself was not opened, and no plate, accession number or footnote in it was read.
18. Kru seamen of Liberia and Sierra Leone worked aboard European vessels, acquired guitars, and from the First World War onward spread a two-finger picking technique — reported to derive from Akan seperewa playing — along the West African coast through Krutown settlements, giving rise to dockside palm-wine music and thence to guitar-band highlife. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary from music-history sites rather than from ethnomusicological literature; none was opened, and the seperewa derivation rests on oral tradition reported at second hand.