Narváez, Peter. 2001.

“ Unplugged: Blues Guitarists and the Myth of Acousticity”, in

A. Bennett and D. Kevin (eds.), Guitar Cultures, Oxford: Berg.

In contrast to the pragmatic and aesthetic views of African-American blues

musicians toward guitars, the cultural constructions of acoustic guitar and electric
guitar as sonic binary opposites, which emerged in the 1950s and early 1960s
amongst European and North American blues revival audiences and performers,
arrived with considerable ideological baggage. It was during that period, of what
Neil Rosenberg has called the ‘great folk boom’ (1993: 27–33), that a commitment
to what will be referred to here as the ‘myth of acousticity’ developed.

In addition, however, the myth of acousticity, which was embraced during the
folk boom, attaches ideological signifieds to the acoustic guitar, making it a
democratic vehicle vis-à-vis the sonic authoritarianism of electric instruments.

During the latter 1930s and early 1940s the groundwork for viewing the acoustic
guitar as an active medium for democracy was well developed by the folk music
sectors of the Popular Front, a left-wing coalition centred in New York City (Reuss
1971), which involved African-American blues artists such as Huddie Ledbetter
(‘Leadbelly’), Josh White, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry (Denisoff 1971;
Lieberman 1989; Wolfe and Kornell 1992). There was perhaps no better dramatization
of this than when, in 1944, folksinger-songwriter Woodrow (‘Woody’) Wilson
Guthrie (1912–67) toured with a sign on his guitar that read ‘This Machine Kills
Fascists’ (Klein 1982; Hampton 1986: 93–148).