"Guitar" Transcript

By Mark Sundaram

Welcome to the Endless Knot! Today we’re asking where the word guitar comes from, and tracing the instrument’s history across 4 continents.

The etymology of the word guitar is our first clue to the origins of the instrument itself. Most dictionaries will tell you that guitar comes ultimately from the Greek kithara, a kind of seven-stringed lyre used in Ancient Greece; however, comparing the instruments makes it quite clear that the two are only distantly related. They’re both members of the chordophone family of musical instruments, that is they both generate sound by the vibration of strings between two points, but they’re from two very different categories of chorophones. The kithara is a lyre-type instrument in which the strings are attached to a yoke or crossbar on one end and the soundboard on the other, and different tones are generated simply by having strings tuned to different notes, and the guitar is a lute-type instrument made of a distinct body and neck, with different notes being produced by stopping the string at different points along the neck thus changing the length of the portion of the string that is being allowed to vibrate. These lute-type instruments go back a long way, and there are ancient Hittite carvings depicting what are loosely described as the earliest guitars, looking rather familiar with the curved waist shape and frets (where you stop the strings to play the different notes) along the neck looking very much like a small guitar. The Ancient Greeks did have a lute-type instrument as well, called the pandura, typically with three strings, which was later inherited by the Romans along with the kithara. The word pandura probably comes from some unidentified pre-Greek language, with cognates appearing in a number of languages from different groups such as Armenian, Ossetian, and Georgian, and comes into English in a number of forms, such as mandolin, a diminutive of Italian mandola. It also, in part, lies behind banjo, which is likely a combination of bandora (another lute-like instrument) from Spanish bandurria and Portuguese bandurra, and mbanza from the Kimbundu language of Angola, which is a Bantu language. The banjo itself descends from the mbanza and other similar West African stringed instruments with a gourd body and skin head, first appearing in its modern form in 18th c. North America, having been brought over by enslaved people to the plantations of the American south.

As for the word guitar then, the etymological and developmental solution becomes clearer when you consider the similar sounding word for the Indian instrument the sitar, a chordophone with a long, hollow, fretted neck with a gourd-shaped body, and 18 to 21 strings, some of which are sympathetic strings which simply resonate in sympathy with the played strings. Despite this large number of strings, the etymology of the word sitar indicates an origin in an instrument of only three, coming from Persian setar meaning literally “three-string”. Persian tar meaning “string” comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *ten- “to stretch”, also the source of the word tense through Latin, tone and tune through Greek and Latin (because of course a stretched string makes a note or tone), and also possibly the word dance from the idea of the formation of a line or chain in dancing. Persian se means “three”, from Proto-Indo-European *trei-, hence setar “three-strings”. And the setar was not alone; the Persians named all their lute-like instruments after the number of strings they had. There’s the two-stringed dotar from the root *dwo- “two”, the five-stringed panchtar from *penkwe- “five”, the six-stringed shashtar from *s(w)eks- “six”, and most importantly for our purposes, the four-stringed chartar from Persian char “four” (shortened from chahar), from the Proto-Indo-European root *kwetwer- “four”. The chartar, frequently shortened to simply tar, often now appears with only three doubled strings called courses, but has a waisted body due to its double bowl construction, reminiscent of the modern guitar, and it’s important to note that the earliest forms of the guitar in Europe had four courses of strings, appropriate to the name chartar and very unlike that seven-stringed Greek kithara. It’s this Persian name chartar that most likely lies behind the word guitar, perhaps influenced by Greek and Latin kithara (which itself probably came from Persian chartar). Now the question is, how did the Persian chartar make its way to Europe (with the name probably passing through Arabic)?

It’s likely this happened after the early 8th c., the time of the Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula, which was then called Al-Andalus. During this period there was a great influence of Islamic culture, including music, on areas that would later be Spain. It should be noted that though the invasion included the Moors (that is the Arab and North African Muslims), much of the local population would have converted to the new religion, only to convert back to Christianity in the following centuries after the Reconquista. Now the transmission of culture and technology between groups is sometimes referred to as trans-cultural diffusion, such as the spread of a technology like iron smelting or the alphabet through the ancient world, or the spread of a fashion like the western business suit across the world in the 20th century, and this can happen through a number of different mechanisms, such as contact between neighbouring cultures, or the invasion or migration of a people. This concept of cultural diffusion should also be understood in contrast to cultural appropriation, in which one culture adopts elements of another culture, which can be harmful when the adopting culture is a dominant one in relation to a disadvantaged or minority culture. In the case of Moorish musical influence in Al-Andalus, there were a great many musical instruments that stuck around in Christian Spain after the Reconquista, including the oud — no, not that ood — another lute-type chordophone, purportedly introduced to Al-Andalus in the 9th century by the musician, poet, and all around polymath Ziryab, who may himself have been Persian. In fact the oud is the ancestor of the lute itself — the word lute comes from al-ud, literally “the oud” with the Arabic definite article al- appended to the beginning of the word, similar to words like algebra, algorithm, and alcohol, and to that place name Al-Andalus also known as Andalusia. Actually al-ud means literally “the wood”. But there are definitely similarities between the lute and the guitar, though the two instruments are not particularly closely related to one another, with the lute having a very different body shape and rounded back (compared to the flat back of the guitar), a relatively short neck, and the headstock, where the tuning pegs are, at a sharp angle from the neck. But the word guitar and other words closely related to it were early on used quite indiscriminately in Europe to refer to a number of different chordophones, some more closely related to the lute, and there were two distinct varieties of instruments referred to as guitarra early on, the guitarra morisca, or Moorish guitar, with a rounded lute-like body and sickle-shaped headstock, and the guitarra latina, or Latin guitar, perhaps more closely related to the Roman pandura as the name might imply.
Some of the many chordophone instruments that were around during the development of the guitar from the middle ages into the renaissance include the citole, commonly used from 1200 to 1350, and the gittern, first appearing in the 13th century. The citole, carved from a single block of wood, with a deep neck that was so thick it required a thumb hole carved into it, was neither round-backed like a lute nor flat-backed like a guitar, but had a slanted back leading from the sides to a ridge in the centre where the neck joined the body, and generally had four single strings. The gittern, whose name is obviously in some way related to the word guitar, though the exact relationship is uncertain, was shaped more like a lute, with a rounded back, though the headstock differed from the lute, coming more or less straight out from the neck and generally ended in a carved human or animal head, and had four doubled courses of strings. More closely related to the guitar was the vihuela, which first appeared in the mid-15th c. It had a waisted body with a flat back, much like a small guitar, but was tuned like a lute, and had five or six courses. The vihuela continued to develop in two different directions, the vihuela de arco, which was played with a bow, eventually giving birth to the viol family of instruments, and the vihuela de mano, plucked by the fingers, which likely influenced the development of the guitar. Not to be confused with the gittern was the cittern, which was probably descended from the medieval citole, first appearing in the 16th c., and was, unusually, wire strung rather than using gut strings like most other chordophones at that time. Though teardrop shaped, it had a flat back and was cheaper to construct and generally more rugged and portable, and therefore useful for casual music making, and as a result, along with the gittern, became associated with the Renaissance version of the whole sex, drugs, and rock & roll scene. If you have the image in your mind of a young lover serenading his beloved lady on the balcony above, the instrument in question might well have been a gittern or cittern. In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer associates the gittern with the rowdy tavern environment, depicting the clerk Absolom, who also liked to take his gittern to any tavern that had lively barmaids, serenading the lusty Alisoun outside her window. William Shakespeare on the other hand uses the insult cittern-head in reference to the often grotesque, sometimes racist, carved head on the headstock. It was also common for barbers to keep citterns for the use of their customers, who could pick one up and entertain himself and others with it while he waited. This was such a common practise that the word cittern became a byword for loose women, with Thomas Dekker, whose poem “Cradle Song” would later inspire Paul McCartney to write the Beatles song “Golden Slumbers”, writing in his early 17th c. play The Honest Whore “Is she a whore? A barber’s cittern for every man to play on?”, and Ben Jonson writing in Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, a play from around the same time about a man whose scheme to get his inheritance from his uncle involved tricking him into marrying a boy dressed up as a woman, “That cursed barber … I have married his cittern that’s common to all men”. This association was so strong that it may have in part influenced the word slattern meaning “slut”, which is part of a group of words beginning with sl- that shifted in meaning from “sloppy” to “slutty”. The word slut itself in some dialects can still be used to mean “untidy” rather than “sexually promiscuous”. In any case, the guitar has continued this association with sexualized women, though perhaps not in as crude a manner, with many musicians giving their guitars women’s names, such as blues guitarist B.B. King and his famous Lucille.

But by later in the 17th century, the guitar, which had first appeared earlier in the Renaissance in Europe in the form of a four course instrument, made its way to England, brought over by Charles II returning from exile after Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth period, by which point it was probably a five course instrument now referred to as the Baroque guitar. Before King Charles brought the guitar with him, England had mostly been using the lute — indeed Samuel Pepys, whom Charles had put in charge of safely transporting his guitar to England, preferred the lute, and privately made disparaging comments about the new instrument. But of course the King playing guitar was a major trend setter — no not that King — and thus began a guitar boom in England. I guess you could say the guitar put the strum in instrument! Now, this new-found popularity became a problem for harpsichord makers — it’s the age old rock & roll problem, which was better, guitar or keyboards. But one wily harpsichord maker named Jacob Kirkman came up with a clever approach. He bought a bunch of cheap guitars and gave them out at barbershops, bars, and brothels, basically anywhere the lower classes congregated, so that his upscale clients would look down on the guitar as un-chic and go back to buying pricey harpsichords again. Nevertheless, the pull of the guitar was too strong. In his 1685 play Sir Courtly Nice, John Crowne uses the guitar as a metaphor for fanciness and sexiness with the line “Oh! No, Madam, he’s the general guitar o’ the town, inlay’d with everything women fancy.” Indeed the guitar became quite a popular instrument with women, and it became fashionable for young women in wealthy aristocratic families to have guitar tutors, who would often, as with other household employees, live in the same house and see the young lady everyday, and well… as Sir John Vanbrugh wrote in his 1705 play The Confederacy, “Pshaw! She’s taken up with her impertinent Guitar Man!”

The 19th century saw the guitar develop into its modern classical guitar form, with six individual strings instead of courses of doubled strings, and the construction and form of this instrument can be attributed to Spanish guitarist and luthier (that’s a maker of chordophones in the lute family, derived from the word lute) Antonio de Torres, with all modern classical guitars essentially following that pattern. The steel-string acoustic guitar, on the other hand, was an American innovation in the late 19th century, becoming widespread around 1900. Steel strings made the guitar louder, but added tension to the soundboard, so stronger bracing needed to be added to the underside of the soundboard. And the quest for more volume characterizes the development of the guitar over the 20th century. And surprisingly, Hawaiian music is at the centre of this story. The story starts in the 1889 when Hawaiian boarding school student Joseph Kekuku was walking along the road in Honolulu holding his guitar when he spotted a railway spike lying on the ground and picked it up, but accidentally pressed it against the strings on his guitar and liked the sound. From this he developed a whole new way of playing, with the guitar lying flat on his lap and using a metal bar over the neck to play the notes. It’s much debated whether the Mississippi Delta blues tradition of playing slide guitar, with either a glass bottle neck or a metal pipe on one finger with the guitar in the traditional position flat against the body, was influenced by the Hawaiian lap steel playing or if it was an independent invention, perhaps rooted in African musical traditions. In any case, lap steel guitar took off locally and became a distinguishing feature of Hawaiian music. By the early 20th century Hawaiian musicians began touring the US and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 introduced mainstream America to Hawaiian music, and you can hear more about American appropriation of Hawaiian and Polynesian culture in our video about the Mai Tai cocktail. By the following year Hawaiian music sold more recordings than any other musical genre in the country, and this Hawaiian music craze lasted throughout the 1920s. It became particularly popular with Western musicians, who often took to playing cowboy music one night and Hawaiian music the next, using basically the same instrumentation, and that’s how steel guitar playing, which later evolved into instruments such as the pedal steel and console steel, became a feature of country music. And steel guitar became a particular feature of Western Swing, an uptempo blend of Western cowboy music and swing jazz music. But there was just one problem: whether in a Hawaiian ensemble or a Western band, the lap steel player, the main lead instrument, had a hard time being heard because the guitar was sitting flat on the player’s lap with the sound hole pointing up at the ceiling. One attempt at making the guitar louder was the resonator guitar, invented by Slovak-American inventor and entrepreneur John Dopyera at the request of steel guitar player George Beauchamp. The way it worked was instead of the bridge conveying the vibrations of the strings to the soundboard of the guitar, those vibrations are conveyed to one or more metal cones that are sort of like the old fashioned purely mechanical amplifying horns on early 20th century phonographs like the Victrolas. These resonator guitars continued to be popular for their distinctive sound even after the advent of electronic amplification, and became particularly associated with both bluegrass and blues music. Dopyera and Beauchamp formed the National String Instrument Company in 1927 to manufacture their new instrument, but later on Dopyera went on to form his own company with his brothers Rudy and Emil, which was called Dobro, short for Dopyera brothers and also meaning “good” in Slovak (ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *dhabh- “to fit together”, also the source, fittingly, of the words daft, deft, fabric, fabricate, and forge), which gave them the slogan “Dobro means good in any language!”, and eventually the word dobro became a generic name for resonator guitars. As for Beauchamp, he apparently was unsatisfied by the volume of these new instruments and started playing around with using electricity to amplify the guitar.

Now actually the first attempt to create a guitar that used electricity wasn’t for the purpose of amplifying the sound, but for sounding the notes. In 1890, George Breed patented his design for an electronic device that would send a pulsed DC current down the strings which would pass through the field of an electromagnet thus causing them to vibrate so you don’t have to strum or pluck them. This meant you could play the guitar one handed, and the notes would continuously sound, sort of like a bowed instrument. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this idea never caught on. But meanwhile other tinkerers were playing around with electronic transmission of sound, such as Thomas Edison, Emile Berliner, and David Edward Hughes, who all worked on the carbon microphone, and Lee de Forest who invented the triode vacuum tube which can amplify an electric signal, and if you want to hear more about these technological developments you can check out our videos “Bug” and “How Amateur are the Olympics”. But once the amplifier existed, all that was needed was a device to “pick up” the vibrations of the strings and convert them into an electric signal, and that was exactly what Beauchamp used to invent the first electric guitar in 1931, manufactured by the Rickenbacker company and officially called the Rickenbacker Electro A-22 but more commonly referred to as the frying pan because of its shape and all metal solid body construction. Basically, the pickup is a permanent magnet wrapped in a copper coil, which creates a magnetic field, which magnetizes the strings, and when the strings vibrate this causes fluctuations in the magnetic field which is picked up as an electric signal in the copper coil. And this system was designed and marketed for Hawaiian music (of which Beauchamp himself was an enthusiast and player) because as you’ll remember Hawaiian music was all the rage at the time. And that’s why the first electric guitar was a lap steel guitar. But soon enough other styles of electric guitars were invented, both hybrid electro-acoustic or hollow body guitars, which were basically acoustic guitars with pickups added to them, and solid body guitars, like the Les Paul and the Stratocaster, and these new electric guitars were adopted for use in other musical genres, like jazz and blues, especially the electric blues genre that grew up in places like Chicago. But most famously the electric guitar became the iconic instrument of rock & roll. And I’m going to pick up that note in another video soon.

While I was working on this video, rock guitar virtuoso Eddie Van Halen passed away, and I wanted to take this chance to celebrate his own innovative impact on the guitar. In addition to constructing his own iconic electric guitar, the Frankenstrat, combining the body style of the Fender Stratocaster with the humbucking PAF pickup of a Gibson ES-335, effectively merging these two classic guitars, he also helped pioneer the two-handed tapping technique. He also held the patent to a flip-out support device mounted on the back of a guitar that allows it to be held in a horizontal position, much like that of Hawaiian lap steel player Joseph Kekuku, so that the guitarist can use the two-handed tapping technique in a manner similar to a keyboard instrument. The innovation of both the instrument and the way it’s played is an ongoing endeavour.

So, from the Hittites through the Greeks and Persians, to India and the Arab world, through Spain to England and on to America, the guitar’s history demonstrates the complicated mechanisms of cultural diffusion — trade, migration, conquest, oppression, entertainment and fashion all played a part in the spread and transformation of this now common-place — and indispensable — instrument.

Thanks for watching! In a way, this is only the first part of a larger story — the story of rock and roll. So stay tuned for an upcoming video about that fascinating history, and the candidates for “first ever rock and roll song”. In the meantime, if you’ve enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe, & click the little bell to be notified of every new episode. And check out our Patreon, where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. I’m @Alliterative on Twitter, and you can visit our website alliterative.net for more language and connections in our podcast, blog, and more!