My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  I remember going to school one day and there was one boy who had a guitar. And he was actually playing the songs I’d heard on the radio. This was before I’d even gotten a record player or 78s — we had no money to be buying records at that point. This boy was playing the sort of music I’d heard, and I thought to myself, “I’ve got one of those at home.” It was a Spanish guitar but it was steel-strung. A round-hole guitar. I don’t know what make it was. Or where’d it come from. And unfortunately, I don’t know where it went. It was there and it was out of tune.

  I might have looked at it and might have touched it and played pretty much what my son does now with the guitar, but I did this at twelve years old. I didn’t have the confidence to just pick it up and start playing. The reason for that was there wasn’t anybody who played guitar and the sort of people that you see playing on the television were already stars. It never crossed my mind at that point that it could be a career, but it was certainly a hobby.

  The thing that happened was this boy said, “Why don’t you bring it along to school and I’ll show you how to tune it.” And that’s exactly what he did. He showed me how to tune it and he showed me some chords. And that was it. Before I knew where I was I was actually able to do what he was doing, playing the same tunes from the radio. So, the essence of it was, given a sort of helping hand, I was self-taught, and then it came from buying and listening to records.

  There weren’t many guitarists around. I mean, this boy was a year older, actually two years older, than I was and he and I were the only guitarists that I knew of, nobody else. By then I could actually play reasonably well. I could play some Chuck Berry and all of that sort music from Chess in Chicago, Bo Diddley and the blues, rockabilly and all the music that meant so much to me in my formative years, like Cliff Gallup, Elmore James and James Burton. And all these sorts of people and their identities were so strong. In those days, I had no access to Robert Johnson — it was too rare. Collectors who had that sort of thing kept it to themselves. It didn’t come out until a few years later for the rest of us.

  I don’t know whether the penny dropped at the time, but the fact is each person’s character and identity was so firmly stamped within six strings. You could just recognize them from listening to a little part. And that’s been a major part of my playing. I always wanted to develop a style so that people would go, “Well, that it is Jimmy.” In those days there would be two guitarists in the local store where I went to in order to hear of other guitarists. You’d hear of maybe a handful of guitarists in the whole of the county. And what we’d met even out of the county, too. I met Jeff Beck. He was another guitarist. And then there was Eric Clapton. There was another guitarist called Martin Stone, whom everybody had thought was a messianic player, except nobody had ever heard him. But he was fantastic. He now runs a bookshop in Paris. I’m not even sure I’ve ever heard him play. But he’s one of these where you’d say of another guitarist, “Yeah, he’s awright but Martin Stone is the guitarist of all guitarists!” Now, even almost twenty years ago, you could almost say that everyone sort of knew someone who had been in a group or who was about to be in a group, playing guitar, if they didn’t play themselves.

  I took the guitar with me to school to let this older boy tune it. I used to take it to school all the time. For me, the guitar was like — even as a child — having a family relative there at school with me. It was something I could communicate with. Consequently I spent most of my time playing the guitar from the first thing in the morning to the last thing at night. My family wanted me to do more homework, actually. Nothing got in the way of that. That was fair enough. They didn’t really know what I was doing. They didn’t understand it. I suppose they probably employed the same logic or principles of logic that people would today. That’s all right. It must have been awful to witness, though, because I’d spent hours and hours listening to records. They must have thought I was doing something besides training for going mad. I had a voracious appetite for listening to everything. It amazes me what six strings can do with application and imagination.

  I never considered myself a natural guitarist. I’d seen other guitarists who seemed to be able to play so easily, but they didn’t even make a career out of it. For me, it was always a hobby. Apart from the point time I was doing sessions and studio work and I really had to be responsible in terms of arriving on time and delivering what was required. Even though I really enjoyed studio work, it was really a challenge because I never knew what I was walking into. I knew I might not be walking into a rock session or even, dare I say, a pop session. It could have been a jazz session or folk. It was really kind of an apprenticeship. Again, it never really seemed like hard work, except when I had a muzak session. That’s when I’d thought it was hard work. I was so accepted — I was one of the lads, even though I was the youngest. But I thought, “No, I can’t do this.”

  My friends, like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, were starting to make statements of their own. So of course I really wanted to get out there and play. I was twenty-two when I took the plunge. I found a sort of fluency of playing and developed my own style even though I didn’t have the best technique. Then again, I had to keep developing that technique.

  I knew the guitar was going to be part of my life from the first time I was able to play something and put together a sequence of chords. I enjoyed the playing more than the singing. I knew that was my life, whether I wanted it to be or not. I had no choice. That’s what it was.

  After my first guitar, my dad got me the next guitar — but it was still an f-hole guitar with a pickup. As I was learning, I was getting an instrument that was more appropriate for the job. But I had this Les Paul Custom. It was absolutely gorgeous. And it’s the guitar I used all the way through my studio work. It was magnificent. When Led Zeppelin started to do very, very well, I was using it. We were doing these numbers where there were encores, so it was a good backup guitar in case I blew a string. I was going on Les Pauls by then, and a Telecaster had been relegated to staying at home and not going on tour anymore. So anyway I was using this Les Paul Custom. I started to feel so confident about this guitar with me on tour. One time we were going from Boston to Montreal. Whatever happened, the guitar did not return back. In those days, we were flying things on local airlines. I just couldn’t believe it. That was really heartbreaking at the time because that was the major guitar from all those formative years.

  Is it floating out there somewhere? Yeah, it’s floating under somebody’s bed. They wouldn’t dare show it to too many people, in case word got out.

  You know, it’s marvelous, the whole thing of the guitar and what it has meant to people. In Victorian times, the equivalent was the piano. The guitar became the piano. It was everyone in the parlor, listening to Artie Moore playing the piano while he sang. That was it. It was just a fantastic movement going on, thanks to America, really, with rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly, country and country blues, country western — all these different aspects of guitar playing. It’s an application and some fascinating techniques have been developed on the guitar. Coming back to it, it’s all still six strings. It never ceases to amaze me. And hopefully it will never cease to amaze me.

  Glossary

  action A term used to describe the distance between the strings and the surface of the fretboard. The “higher” the action, the more difficult it is to press down the strings. “High action” can indicate a warped guitar neck on an acoustic, though a high action is preferred for the slide guitar technique. Action can be modified on guitars by lowering the bridge or adjusting a truss rod, if the guitar has one.

  alegrías A flamenco musical form that means “happiness.” It is rhythmically similar to the soleá for consisting of 12 beats, stressing the third, sixth, eighth, tenth and twelfth beats.

  archtop guitar A 6-string, steel-string acoustic or semi-acoustic guitar with an arched top and an adjustable bridge. This guitar is generally favored by blues and jazz musicians.

  autoharp A musi
cal stringed instrument that features chord bars attached to dampers, which mute and prevent selected strings from sounding apart from the intended chord. It is often played with fingers or a plectrum and is used in country western music.

  bandurrias A type of Spanish mandolin that is played with a plectrum. They date back to the Middle Ages and have evolved from having three strings to the 12-strings of modern bandurrias.

  barre chord A chord that requires a single finger pressing down three strings simultaneously within one fret space (known as a half-barre) or else six strings (called a full barre).

  Bigsby tremolo A type of tremolo arm developed for use on electric guitars by Paul A. Bigsby that allows musicians to bend the pitch of notes or entire chords with their pick hand.

  binding see “purfling”

  bluegrass American roots music from Appalachia that derives from traditional Irish, English, Welsh and Scottish music. One instrument typically performs the melody and improvises on it as the other instruments perform accompaniment.

  bracing The system of wooden struts that support and reinforce the soundboard and back of an acoustic guitar while also enhancing and maintaining the tonal response of the instrument. Many bracing patterns exist and vary according to their own special alchemy developed by individual makers.

  bridge The device that supports the strings on a stringed instrument and transports the vibration of those strings to the “nut” on the headstock of a guitar. The bridge, along with the inserted saddle, helps to collect, raise and anchor the strings.

  bulería A flamenco style of guitar playing that stems from the soleá. It shares the same rhythmical structure, yet it is more up-tempo and often serves as a finale. The bulería has many variations in melody and meter and often incorporates hand claps on the off beats and turns made by the dancer.

  camber Curvature of a guitar neck, fingerboard or fret.

  cavaquinho A small four-stringed instrument from the guitar family that originated in Portugal. The ukulele derives from the cavaquinho, which was brought to Hawaii by Portuguese immigrants in the late nineteenth century. The strings of the cavaquinho are commonly tuned from lower pitch to higher pitch as D-G-B-D, while ukuleles are often tuned G-C-E-A.

  choros or chorinho A popular, spirited form of instrumental Brazilian street music marked by a fast, syncopated rhythm.

  clavija de madera The Spanish description for old peghead tuning keys on flamenco guitars.

  clawhammer style A rhythmic banjo picking style that consists of shaping the hand into a stiff claw-like shape and striking the strings by the motion of the hand at the wrist. The thumb does not pick on the downbeat.

  cutaway guitar/double cutaway A construction where the body of the guitar is literally “cut away” either on one side of both sides of the guitar neck in order to allow a player easier access to the upper bout of the fretboard.

  dampit A humidifier for classical and acoustic guitars that looks like a perforated piece of rubber tubing with a mildly damp sponge inside. It is inserted between the strings of a guitar and into the sound hole so that one end of the hose dangles inside the guitar. It lessens the chance of the wood cracking during dry winter months.

  Dobro guitar (Lurrie Bell, Taj Mahal) A type of resonator guitar constructed by the Dopyera Brothers as competition to the tricone and biscuit designs patented by the National String Instrument Corporation. “Dobro” is a combination of the Dopyera Brothers and is also a pun that translates from their native Slovak to the word “good.” John Dopyera originally worked for the National String Instrument Corporation, who failed to recognize his idea to lower the price of the guitar with a cheaper single-cone version. So Dopyera applied for a patent for an alternative design, which inverted the cone set into a spider web framework, providing an early source of amplification and projection for this type of guitar.

  Dreadnought guitar A type of acoustic guitar made by C.F. Martin with a large body, which creates a louder tone. This guitar, developed by Martin in 1916 for the Oliver Ditson Company, had been named for the large battleship, the HMS Dreadnought, built in 1906. Martin began producing these guitars under their own name in 1931 with the first two models being D-1 and D-2.

  falsetas A melody or riff of a few short musical phrases played by flamenco guitarists either between sung verses of flamenco or to accompany dancers.

  f-holes A sound hole in the upper soundboard of a stringed musical instrument that has a lowercase letter f shape, often seen in the violin and viol families and in archtop guitars. The f-holes allow the soundboards to vibrate more freely and allow the sound inside the instrument to project outward.

  flat top guitar Refers to an acoustic, steel-string guitar with a flat soundboard, as opposed to an archtop guitar.

  fret Metal posts on the neck of a guitar, known collectively as the fretboard. Each fret designates a single note when the string is depressed near the fret post. Frets are configured according to a mathematical ratio that results in an equal tempered division of an octave. Often the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 12th, 15th, 17th, 19th, 21st and 24th frets are marked by inlay designs of exotic colored woods, ivory, mother of pearl or, on cheaper guitars, abalone or plastic. The 12th fret is often marked with double-dots or designs to demarcate the octave.

  Hawaiian slack key guitar A fingerstyle genre that refers to playing in tunings, often requiring the strings to be loosened or slackened until the six strings form a single chord, often G Major.

  Hawaiian steel guitar A basic Spanish style steel-string guitar played on the lap, using a metal bar that slides across the strings.

  headstock The top portion of a guitar where the tuning keys or pegheads are located. This portion of the guitar starts at the nut up on through the tuning keys.

  heel The point at which the neck and fretboard of a guitar is either bolted or glued to the body of the guitar. Classical guitars often have a “Spanish heel” — a neck and headblock carved from a single piece of wood. Most acoustic steel-string guitars except for Taylor guitars have glued or set necks. Electric guitars are constructed both ways.

  inlays Decorative visual details on a guitar, which can be located on the headstock, the rosette of a guitar or the fretboard. Parlor guitars from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries happen to be particularly decorative and showy, with inlay featured on the back of the guitar as well.

  Kalamazoo Gibsons The Gibson Guitar manufacturing plant was originally based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, from the late 1890s, when Orville Gibson first made mandolins, to 1984, when the company was sold to new owners and moved to Nashville. Gibsons made during the Kalamazoo era are considered to be collector’s items.

  kalimba An African thumb piano consisting of pitched tines set against a resonant chamber, such as a carved gourd or piece of wood.

  malagueña A traditional style of Andalusian flamenco music influenced by Moorish music from the region of Málaga, Spain.

  marker dots see “inlay”

  National guitar see “resonator guitar”

  neck The part of the guitar that serves as the base for fretboard and headstock and is attached to the body of the guitar.

  neck joint see “heel”

  nut A slim ivory, steel, brass or plastic bar inserted at the point where the headstock meets the fretboard. It often features grooves, which guide the strings into a consistent position over the fretboard.

  pickguard Often a plastic or laminated piece of material that is placed under the strings on the body of a guitar in order to protect its finished from being scratched by a guitar pick.

  pickups A transducer that converts vibrations from the guitar strings to an electric signal that is amplified. There are many different makes and brands of pickups, and their placement and configuration on the guitar beneath the strings is both an art and a science. Pickups are generally made of a magnet with a core material such as alnico, wrapped with a coil of enameled copper wire, which react together with magnetized guitar strings to create a current that conveys
the sound through the guitar cable into the amp.

  piezo pickup system A type of crystal rather than magnetic pickup used on semi-acoustics and acoustic guitars that is fitted at the bridge. They tend not to pick up on any other magnetic fields and are often inlaid into the bridge or affixed onto the top of the soundboard with putty.

  purfling The narrow binding inlaid into the edges of the top and bottom of a guitar.

  rasqueado A rapid-fire, rhythmically precise strumming technique used in flamenco guitar playing.

  resonator guitar A guitar designed to be louder than conventional acoustic guitars by having the sound produced by one or more spun metal cones known as resonators, which replace the traditional wooden soundboard. Blues musicians often favored resonator guitars for being at least three to five times louder than a conventional wooden acoustic guitar. There are three main resonator styles — the “tricone” with three metal cones in the first National resonator guitars; the single cone “biscuit” design of other National guitars that features a wooden biscuit at the cone apex to support the bridge; and the single inverted “spider” resonator cone of the Dobro guitar. The body of a resonator guitar is often either of wood or metal.

  rosette The decorative inlaid design circling the sound hole of any guitar.

  saddle The raised part of the bridge, often made of plastic or bone on an acoustic guitar and of metal for an electric guitar. It serves as an endpoint to allow the strings to vibrate freely and transfer the vibrations through the bridge into the soundboard and body of the guitar.

  scordatura Refers to alternate tunings, apart from the standard E-A-D-G-B-E guitar tuning.

  semi-hollow body guitar A type of electric guitar with a hollow or chambered sound box body and one or more electric pickups. It is not an electric acoustic guitar, which is an acoustic guitar with added pickups. The term generally refers to f-hole archtop guitars.