Abstracts

Susan Schmidt Horning

ABSTRACT

The first national conference devoted to the electric guitar, Electrified, Amplified and Deified: The Electric Guitar, Its Makers and Players at the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. 1996, explored the cultural impact of the instrument. Historians, manufacturers, museum curators and musicians covered nearly every angle of the instrument’s invention, innovation, and impact but omitted any mention of women electric guitarists. The central instrument in rock & roll, the electric guitar had begun to gain popularity in the late 1930s, but it was not until after World War II that Leo Fender and the Gibson guitar company ramped up mass production. After the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan in 1964, sales of electric guitars jumped from 600,000 in 1963 to 1.5 million in 1965, garage bands proliferated, and the image of the boy with his guitar became a national phenomenon. But this overlooks the dozens of girls who got together in dorms, basements, and garages to form rock bands, not only in the U.S. but across Europe, Scandinavia, and even Indonesia. Although women in jazz and country music had been playing both solid body electric and amplified acoustic guitars since the 1940s, by the 1960s, the association of girls and guitars was rooted in folk music. Girls with electric guitars were marginalized as novelties. Based on primary and secondary sources, this paper explores 1960s all-girl garage bands, in particular focusing on one innovative electric guitarist, Char Vinnedge of The Luv’d Ones.

PRESENTER BIO

Susan Schmidt Horning is associate professor of history at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. She is the author of Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP (2013) and a contributor to Creativity: Technology and Music (Peter Lang, 2016), Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century (2002), and The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon (2004). Schmidt Horning played electric guitar in numerous bands during the 1960s and ‘70s. Her current project is an oral history of all-girl rock bands in the 1960s.

KEYWORDS

garage bands; girl guitarists; gender; technology; power; 1960s

Gerald Ronning

ABSTRACT

Historians have frequently noted the significant role that iconic record stores, local record labels, unique clubs, idiosyncratic radio stations, and inspired cohorts of artists have played in the creation of local music scenes and subcultures. All of these elements appear in the historiography of the Minneapolis music scene and the accounts of the rise of the guitar-oriented bands and artists that emerged from the so-called Minneapolis music “Heyday” of the 1970s through the 1980s. Less appreciated and understood, however, is the role that the guitar shops and music stores that catered to pop and rock musicians have played in the formation of local music scenes. This paper will consider the ways that a small Minneapolis guitar shop called Knut Koupée Music Store engaged with the growing local music scenes and subcultures of the era. Knut Koupée was unique among the many competing music shops in the region in that it not only sold guitars, basses, amps, drums, and keyboards, the store also featured a fully appointed (through profoundly DIY) lutherie shop that employed a series of talented and resourceful craftspersons. Grounded in oral histories taken from the store’s luthiers, salespeople, and customers between 2011 and 2022 this paper suggests ways of understanding the historical impact of guitar shops generally, but specifically suggests that in the realm of craft (lutherie and guitar building) in some very interesting ways Knut Koupée made a unique contribution to the class, racial, and gendered constructions of the evolving Minneapolis music scene.

PRESENTER BIO

Gerald Ronning is professor and chair of Liberal Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. A graduate of Carleton College, Ronning holds a PhD in history from the University of Colorado-Boulder and a MA in history from New York University. His scholarship has won prizes from the Center for the American West and the Labor and Working Class History Association, and he is the recipient of the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award. His current research is in US labor and cultural history.

KEYWORDS

lutherie, cultural history, oral history, subcultures, material culture history, small business history, history of race, class, and gender

Sabatino DiBernardo

ABSTRACT

Guitar collectors go to great lengths to certify the authenticity of rare, vintage, and other desirable guitars. A cursory glance at online shops for musical instruments (e.g., Reverb) indicates the extent to which sellers must go to verify an instrument’s authenticity through a process guaranteeing an instrument’s identification and origin (i.e., proving the instrument is not a copy or fake). By providing a certificate of authenticity (an instrument of trust) and/or disassembling a guitar to display its date of production, serial number, and period-correct components, its putative authenticity is thereby thought to be established and its fraudulence precluded. Certifying authenticity is even more complex when its evaluative (i.e., axiological) lens is directed toward the musical authenticity of a guitarist as a musician. Although subjective variables make such assessments difficult (if not impossible) to authenticate, they persist in vernacular and scholarly music discourses. The certification of musical instruments and judgments of musical authenticity appear to be linked in a common desire to attribute real value in the guaranteed absence of signs of imitation or fraudulence. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, in the rhetoric employed regarding authenticity in music it appears to be the most insincere form of inauthenticity. In this paper, I will explore some of the issues, tensions, and ironies engendered by a desire for authenticity and the anxiety of influence evident in a rhetoric of genius, inspiration, origins, and identity.

PRESENTER BIO

Dr. Sabatino DiBernardo is a Senior Lecturer in Religion, Philosophy, and Humanities at the University of Central Florida in the Department of Philosophy and a guitarist. His teaching and research interests are in philosophy, religion, popular music, poststructuralism, and irony studies. Some of his publications include contributions to the following volumes: This is the Sound of Irony: Music, Politics and Popular Culture (Ashgate, 2015); Music at the Extremes: Essays on Sounds Outside the Mainstream (McFarland, 2015); Finding God in the Devil’s Music: Critical Essays on Rock and Religion (McFarland, 2019); Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

KEYWORDS

Guitar; Guitarist; Authenticity; Anxiety; Irony

Steve Waksman

ABSTRACT

The history of the electric guitar, as it has been written to date, has understandably placed primary emphasis upon the evolution of the instrument itself, concentrating on notable companies (Gibson, Fender, Gretsch, Rickenbacker), models (the Frying Pan, the ES-150, the Les Paul, the Telecaster), and players. Marginal to this history in academic and popular accounts alike has been the development of amplifiers and amplification. This general omission is especially notable because an “electric” guitar is for all intents and purposes not electric until it can be played through an amplifier. That is, the amp is a necessary component of the electric guitar, without which it would lack the qualities – technological, aural, and cultural – that distinguish the instrument from its acoustic counterpart.

This presentation will offer a concise preliminary set of proposals for how one might conduct a history of guitar amplifiers, as one part of a broader history of amplification. Drawing upon new research in early electric guitar history by myself and others such as Matthew Hill, I will seek to offer some clarification about when innovations in amplification technology began to intersect with innovations in instrument design and will suggest a series of key historical moments when the electric guitar amplifier assumed new shape and significance. I will also draw upon work on the technological and cultural history of sound by Emily Thompson, Jonathan Sterne, Mara Mills, and others to link amplification technology to broader cultural currents such as the rise of a modern, mass mediated public sphere and the creation of assistive technologies in response to the treatment of hearing loss as a disability.

PRESENTER BIO

Steve Waksman is the Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music at Smith College. His publications include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (1999), This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (2009), and Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in June 2022. With Jan-Peter Herbst, he is co-editing the Cambridge Companion to the Electric Guitar, with an expected publication date of fall 2024.

KEYWORDS

amplifiers; amplification; music technology; sound studies; electric guitar history