It’s hard to think of popular music without the electric guitar. The instrument became the cornerstone of rock ‘n’ roll, and grew into something far more than just another instrument. The tool behind laddering solos, soul-searing riffs and the foundational music that awoke a generation from conformity would fast become a totem of power, assertion and authenticity.
But everything has to start somewhere.
There must have been a first musician to pick-up an early axe and hit those first few pickup-channelled notes. Aside, of course, from the engineers tinkering away on behalf of instrument manufacturers behind closed factory doors.
It led us to wonder, just who was that prime instigator?
While trying to dig into just who was the first to *own* an electric guitar seemed a nigh-on impossible task, it actually transpires that working backwards from ascertaining who the first person to *record* electric guitar was, actually offers up a viable answer to that first, seemingly impossible, question.
First, some context. The electric guitar came about in the early 1930s due to the necessity of being heard in increasingly larger clubs by jazz and big band ensembles, with the smaller sound hole of a guitar proving to be frequently inaudible when tightly packed on stage alongside live drums, double bass and horns.
The first tranche of these stage-ready electrics were custom-made especially for this purpose, and harnessed electromagnetic transducers.
But the first bona-fide electric guitar – or the first instrument that was pickup-driven, at least – was the oddly dubbed ‘Frying Pan’ in 1932.
It was designed by George Beauchamp, Paul Barth and Alfred Rickenbacker (a familiar name to guitar-aficionados we’re sure).
It was this unusual looking relic that sported the world’s first bona-fide pickups. These essential magnetic coils would capture the resonation of the strings and transmit them electronically. These signals could then be output (via a jack lead) into external amplification. It’s the basic principle on which electric guitars still operate today.
Shortly after its release, these early pioneers would found the ‘Electro String Instrument Corporation’, and lay out the first stall in a brand new marketplace. Theses were the first – in commercial terms – steps for an instrument that would soon dominate the ears and hearts of millions.
At, that same time frame, an extremely prodigious 10 year-old guitarist living in Chicago was keeping abreast of these high-tech developments.
George Barnes had an ear for music, and had started playing piano at the remarkably young age of 4 – heartily encouraged by his professional musician family. His father in particular, was a piano-maker, and both Barnes’ parents regularly performed with the Chicago Light Opera.
Entranced by melody, George soon started studying under the tutelage of a South Chicago Heights teacher named Lady Winter at the age of 6.
Sadly, due to the economic downturn following the great depression, the family were forced to sell said piano, amongst a great many other possessions.
The only musical item left was a Sears Roebuck Silvertone guitar, which the musically-obsessed George soon picked up.
Despite its finger-callousing high-action, Barnes soon learned his way around the instrument, and began to noodle his way towards becoming guitar-fluent.
Although he was left-handed, Barnes approached the instrument as a right-handed player would. He’d later say that this would become a key ingredient in his playing style, emphasising that the dominant hand should be the one to manage the fretboard. This was the secret that lay behind Barnes’ meticulous mastery of scales.
Though influenced by the increasing exposure to jazz, Barnes’ felt more of a leaning towards soloing than simply strumming along behind the vocalist. But back then – in the pre-electric guitar world – that was something of an exception to the norm.
“There were few guitarists then who soloed. I didn’t want to play rhythm; I wanted to play melody,” George told Guitar Player Magazine in 1975. “I heard many records by Django (Reinhardt), but I couldn’t relate to his playing because he sounded foreign to me. The musicians who influenced my playing the most were the horn and reedmen I played with while I was growing up in Chicago.”
Figuring out the science behind the burgeoning idea of pickups himself, the 10 year-old George enlisted his tech-savvy brother to construct a simple unit that could be placed over his guitar and amplify the strings.
“In 1931, my older brother, who is an electronic genius, built me a pickup and an amplifier before they were even out on the market. He did this for me, because he knew I wanted to play solo lines which could be heard in a band,” George told Guitar Player. “The first electric guitar came out the following year.”
So was George the first actual musician – outside the R&D department of Rickenbacker and Dobro – to play and master a legitimate electric guitar?
Barnes, who passed away in 1977 at age 56, never made this as an absolute claim, but was open to it being himself; “Nobody knows who had the first electric guitar; maybe I did. I knew, the first time I played one, that that instrument was going to take me through my career for the rest of my life.”
One thing we can be pretty clear on, however, is that Barnes was the first person to record electric guitar.
We have to jump forward a few years from Barnes’ brother’s generous feat of DIY to 1938. In the intervening years, Barnes had formed his own group and had become a staple on the Chicago music scene.
Eventually Barnes – then at the still remarkably young age of 16 – was enlisted by blues guitarist Big Bill Broonzy to record his songs It’s a Low-Down Dirty Shame and Sweetheart Land.
It’s the recording of the former that is believed by many to be the very first time an electric guitar was committed to record.
After getting a massive headstart on everybody else via his homemade instrument, Barnes was keen to bring in his favoured guitar – then a Gibson ES-150 – into the studio.
That Gibson model was one of the first to feature a ‘Charlie Christian’-style pickup, and was at that point a de-rigeour staple of Barnes’ live playing.
His spritely, well-defined soloing atop It’s a Low-Down Dirty Shame was – most evidence suggest – the first time an actual electric guitar had been heard on a commercially available record.
Recorded direct-to-lacquer, using a ribbon microphone to capture both Broonzy’s vocal as well as George’s guitar line, the track was – as all tracks at that time were – captured quickly in the one take you hear on the record.
The wiry lead still leaps out of the recording, sounding energetic and expressive – it’s a smile-inducing debut for the instrument that would change the world.
But, was it the first?
Some would argue that in fact jazz pioneer Eddie Durham should take that accolade.
Durham, a huge pioneer of electric guitar, had taken to augmenting his guitar tone with many self-built devices to amplify the sound, including resonators and megaphones.
Most notably, the 1935 track Hittin’ the Bottle which was recorded with Jimmie Lunceford found Eddie experimenting with resonator guitar two years prior to It’s a Low-Down Dirty Shame.
But was Durham’s inarguably innovative recording techniques genuinely a contender for ‘first electric guitar’?
We’d argue that the accolade still goes to George, being that Eddie harnessed a resonator guitar (which relied on metal cones to amplify the sound) as opposed to a pick-up based instrument.
We’re intrigued by any other claims to the contrary, and encourage readers to comment below if they have any further information or strong alternative theories.
For George, being at the vanguard of electric guitar recording was just the first studio work day of of many. Shortly after recording with Big Bill, at age 17, he was hired as hired as the staff guitarist for the NBC Orchestra.
He went on to lay down licks for a revolving door of bluesmen, jazz and country musicians – becoming a foundational figure in the electric guitar’s early popularisation with the record-buyers who’d end up spearheading rock ‘n’ roll.
He’d go on to work with Jazz Gillum, Benny Goodman, Connie Francis, Frank Sinatra and Patsy Cline amongst many others. He’d also be the player that first laid down an electric guitar on a Bob Dylan recording. It was his very first single, in fact – Mixed-Up Confusion from 1962.
When asked by Guitar Player in 1975 about his legacy,, Barnes recounted that he was surprised to hear just how much he’d contributed to the canon of popular music; “They tell me down at the union, that I have recorded more than any other person in their contract file. I don’t know how many recording dates I’ve done, but one day I intend to add them up. I know the number is well into the thousands.”
That Guitar World interview, conducted just two years prior to his death in 1977, catches George reflecting on his musical legacy in a humble, yet inspiring light. He rounds out that interview with the following sentiment; “I’ve often said that there aren’t enough lifetimes for me to do all the musical things I want to do.”
But being the man to first bring the electric guitar to the world’s ears for the very first time is quite a legacy.
George Barnes’ story is celebrated over at his family-owned websitewhich includes a vast repository of information and content around his life and work.
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