Guitar

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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.

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