ABSTRACT
The guitar’s previous role in American music had largely been that of a polite parlour instrument found in middle and upper-class homes, associated with a kind of semi-classical music. The impact of the guitar in Southern black music at this time can be gauged by examining some contemporary accounts of observers and later recollections of musicians and their associates and family members. The 1890s and turn-of-the-century period were an age of industrialism, manufacturing, invention, and growing consumerism in American life. The growth of a cash economy and incipient consumerism in the 1890s coincided with a new secularism, worldliness, realism, and pragmatism in black life and culture. The reasons why Deep South folk blues guitar did not simply assume wholesale the characteristics of Latin American, Italian, parlour, string band, and ragtime guitar styles have much to do with this pre-existing, largely African-based musical tradition and folk aesthetic.
