Hey, buddy.
Hi, Joy.
Welcome to the auditions for the Guitar Orchestra.
It's going to be the most epic guitar-only band ever.
I was so glad to see that you were trying out.
Thank you.
I have to admit, I'm a little nervous, but I've been practicing a lot.
I'm sure you'll be awesome, but where's your guitar?
It's right here.
Where?
I don't see it.
Well, of course you can't see it, silly.
It's an air guitar.
I can play other types of guitar too, but I like this one because it's so versatile.
Check it out.
Acoustic.
Metal.
Power chord, power chord, power chord.
Jazz.
Oh, let's not forget kitty cat.
Meow.
Okay, thanks, Joy.
That's enough.
Now freestyle!
Joy, thank you.
I think I've heard all I need to hear.
Oh, sure.
I guess I'm just so good you can tell that I'm in right away.
I'll probably be first chair in the air guitar section, right, buddy?
Yeah, I think I'll be the only chair in the air guitar section.
Awesome.
Well, do you need help with the rest of the auditions?
Sure, but we better get started.
The concert is tonight.
Let's hit it!
Hello, and welcome to Forever Ago from APM Studios.
I'm Joy Dolo, and I'm here today with Buddy.
And we're holding auditions for our guitar orchestra.
Okay.
How are these auditions going to work?
Well, I hired a casting agent to help find some talent.
Oh, and there she is.
Joy, meet reporter slash guitar talent, Scout Grace Tatter.
Hey, everybody.
So happy to be here.
So, tell me a little bit more about this guitar castra.
What sound are we going for?
It's going to be so epic.
Tons of guitars.
All different styles and sounds.
And the goal is to rock.
Okay, got it.
That's super helpful.
You know, rock and roll almost didn't exist, at least not how we know it today.
Rock is all about the guitar, but for a long time, the guitar was hard to hear and not that popular.
If it weren't for a few key innovations, the guitar might still be a background player, not the showstopper we know and love.
So how does an electric guitar sound different from just a guitar?
You mean an acoustic guitar?
The kind that's big and has that hole in the middle?
Yeah, I think so.
I guess I don't know the differences between all types of guitars.
Why don't we bring in my first guitarist from the 1600s, which was 100 years before the United States even became a country?
So there was no electricity.
She plays one of the first guitars that ever existed, and I think you're going to love her.
Hello.
I like your rough collar.
It looks like your head is being served on a platter of tissues.
Thank you.
I...
I think.
In Leonore's time, the guitar was brand new.
But people all over the world have played stringed instruments long before that.
There were stringed instruments that were played with bows in Central Asia by the 10th century, more than a thousand years ago.
And the kora, a stringed instrument made out of the gourd that could possibly have been played in Mali as early as the 1300s.
Ooh, I want to learn to play the air kora next.
Big gourd fan.
The Spanish guitar, a lot like the guitars we play today, was plucked with fingers, not played with a bow.
Back then, the guitar was mainly an instrument for amateurs.
People didn't get paid to play it.
But there were still some wonderful players, including Leonor.
Leonor, will you play us something?
"'T would be my honor.
I shall beginneth."
Oh, that's lovely.
Let's hear how you'll sound with the air guitar section.
One, two, three, four.
Psst, Joy, that's you.
Sorry, I just got mesmerized by this beautiful music.
But yes, yes, let me just tune up here.
Okay, I'm ready.
One, two, three, four.
Grace Leonore is really great, but I don't know if we're going to be able to hear her over Joy's air guitar playing.
Okay, I'll bring in someone who plays the electric guitar.
The what?
The kinetic cigar?
No, the... Hold on.
Joy, Leonore, you can stop playing now.
Phew, thank you.
Okay, sorry Grace, what were you saying?
I think we're going to need the electric guitar.
Of course, people still play the acoustic guitar, like Leonora's today, in many genres, from classical to folk to pop.
But the electric guitar is louder, and it's easier to hear it over other instruments.
I totally understand it.
I'm curious to see this electric guitar myself.
I have never heard of such a thing.
Hmm, okay.
To find some electric guitarist, we're going to have to skip quite a few centuries.
After all, we didn't really start using electricity every day until the 19th century, and most homes in the United States didn't have electric power even 100 years ago.
But don't worry, I have connections all throughout history and I think I have just the person for you.
We'll call him in now.
His name is Charlie, Charlie Christian.
Let's bring him in.
Hello, hello, Charlie Christian.
Nice to meet you.
Where are you in from, Charlie?
Oklahoma originally.
But if you're a musician, you travel a lot.
I'm coming to you from 1939, the jazz age.
Ooh, the jazz age.
I love it.
Some people call me Jazzy Joy.
They do?
Well, no, but they could.
I'm full of snaz and pizzazz.
Why not jazz?
Anyway, Charlie, how long have you been playing this electric guitar?
Not that long, actually.
In my time, it was still super new.
The first patent for the electric guitar was back in the 19th century, before people even used electricity all that much.
So the electric guitar didn't become well known for many years.
Not to brag, but I'm kind of credited with making the electric guitar a big thing.
You should brag.
That's very cool.
Yeah, so how'd it happen?
Well, in my day, jazz was the bee's knees.
Ah!
Really popular, you know, especially big band jazz.
What's that?
It's exactly what it sounds like a big band with lots of instruments, loud ones like trumpets and drums.
And so guitars playing in big bands kind of had the same problem as Leonor just did.
No one could hear them.
Exactly.
To be heard over the trumpet, the clarinet, the bass, the drums, the piano, the trombone, guitars had to play really hard, so hard their fingers would bleed.
That all changed around 1931, when stores started selling electric guitars.
I picked one up just a few years later.
It was expensive, but worth it.
That's another great thing about the air guitar.
It's free.
My investment paid off.
One day, somebody heard me playing and asked me to audition for the Benny Goodman sextet.
Benny Goodman?
No way!
Who's that?
Benny Goodman was one of the most famous musicians of his time.
A real celebrity.
For the first part of my audition, I played an old-fashioned acoustic guitar.
But Benny wasn't too impressed.
Then he asked me to play this song called Rose Room on the electric guitar.
It was a trick.
He thought I wouldn't know it, but I absolutely knew it.
So I played that song for 40 minutes straight on my electric.
I knocked their socks off.
The fellow who brought me into play said that he'd never seen Benny so impressed.
Wow, nice going.
And that's how I got the gig.
It was a big deal too because I'm black and Benny is white.
You didn't see people like us playing together that often.
In the 1930s, there was legal segregation.
Laws passed by white people that discriminated against black people and other people of color by keeping them out of certain spaces.
Right.
So being in Benny's band helped me cross some of those barriers.
And boy, did we swing.
Here's us playing in Carnegie Hall in 1939.
In our new discovery, Charles Christian at the electric guitar.
Huzzah!
Splendid playing.
Wow, that was so good.
Yeah, you can really rock that guitar.
No idea what you mean, but yeah, I can bop.
You know, before me and My Electric, guitarists really didn't solo.
But I did, and I made it look easy.
Lots of people started soloing after me.
Wow.
To think, if you and the electric guitar didn't show people what the instrument could do, rock bands might be full of trumpet players.
And, like, heavy metal would be altubas.
And punk would be clarinets.
Charlie, your guitar doesn't look all that different from Leonore's.
That's right.
I play at a Gibson Spanish guitar.
It's hollow, just like Leonore's, but it was made especially so you can plug it into this amplifier.
That's an amplifier?
It looks like a box.
Yeah, that's the key to my loud sound.
It's basically a big speaker.
Here's how it works.
You see, there are coils underneath the strings of my guitar that create an electronic magnetic field.
Those coils pick up the vibrations of my strings and turn them into electronic signals.
Those signals are sent like a message through this cable to the amplifier.
Then the amplifier reads the signals and turns them back into sounds, but louder.
All that in no time flat.
Cool.
Okay, Charlie, I think we've heard all we needed to hear.
You're in.
Amazing.
Me and my guitar are ready.
Before we hear our next audition, Grace, we need to take five and play a little Fast Things First.
This is the game where we try to put things in order from oldest to newest.
Today's objects are record players, headphones, and pianos.
So what do you think, buddy?
Pianos came first.
Pianos?
Why do you say that?
They just seem like some old thing.
And you play piano too, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, so you know when they were invented, huh?
Yes.
So pianos seem like the most oldest thing.
So what do you think came next then?
Record player.
You know, I'd buy that because I feel like that's like 50s maybe?
Oh, yeah.
Something like that?
I think headphones came last.
Why do you think that?
It just seems like some new thing that was made like 2008.
Like in the 2000s or maybe 1990s.
Yeah, something that's really early.
I actually agree with you.
I definitely think headphones were the most recent in history.
So we'll be back with the answers right after this.
If you have ideas for First Things First or topics you'd like to hear us cover on the show, please send them to us.
Go to foreverago.org slash contact.
History is everywhere.
What do you want to explore?
Tell us.
Again, that's foreverago.org slash contact.
Did you know that movie trailers were originally shown after movies?
Nowadays, movie trailers are essentially short commercials for movies that'll be released in the future.
You buy a ticket for a movie, you sit down in the theater, but before you get what you came for, you get some commercials or trailers.
But about a hundred years ago, motion pictures, also known as movies, were new.
Up to that point, people had still pictures to look at.
Or they could go see live theater, actors on a stage.
A lot of these early movies were short and just chapters in a longer story, kind of like TV shows today.
So in order to show audiences what would be coming in the next chapter, they'd show a little preview of it at the end of the movie.
In other words, it trailed behind the movie.
But now, trailers come before the movie and should be called firsters.
At least they give us time to get popcorn before the movie starts.
Will this narrator come back next time with more fascinating history facts?
Will his voice sound even deeper and more charming?
Will he finally get this popcorn kernel unstuck from his teeth?
Come back for next week's thrilling chapter.
You're listening to Forever Go.
I'm Buddy.
And I'm Joy.
Okay, Buddy, are you ready to hear the answers to First Things First?
Yes.
Great.
So, you said pianos, record players, headphones.
Guess what, Buddy?
You were absolutely right.
All the way.
Smart guy.
So the first thing was piano.
The piano was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1655 to 1731 of Italy.
Cristofori was unsatisfied by the lack of control that musicians had over the volume level of the harpsichord.
He is credited for switching out the earlier harpsichord's plucking mechanism with a hammer to create the modern piano around 1700.
Did you know that, Buddy?
No.
Next up is record player.
The earliest version of a record player, the phonograph, was invented in 1877 at Thomas Edison's Menlo Park Lab.
Sound was recorded as grooves in aluminum foil made by a tiny needle that vibrated when sound waves hit it.
And last and not least, and Buddy is correct, the most recent in history is headphones.
In 1891, a French engineer named Ernest Mejardier patented what he called a bi-telephone.
This would prove to be the first recorded version of an in-ear headphone.
American engineer, Nathaniel Baldwin invented the first pair of audio headphones resembling modern-day pairs at his kitchen table in 1910.
The U.S.
Navy ordered 100 pairs, not knowing that Baldwin was making them by hand.
So there you go.
Now you know a little bit about headphones, pianos, and record players.
Can you believe that about the headphones?
I thought they would be like more recent, like 2000, but they started in 1891.
That's crazy.
I know.
And just having them in the ear, that was like a whole thing, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, Grace, hope you had a nice break.
But we still need some more players for our epic guitar-kistra.
We have Leonor on acoustic.
Charlie's early electric guitar.
And my air guitar.
Meow, meow.
Yeah, how could we forget?
I also want real rock and roll energy.
When will we get to that?
Okay, I have someone great for you.
I think you should see my friend Les Paul and his solid body guitar.
The first of its kind.
Les, come on in.
What is he carrying?
That looks like a broomstick with strings.
No way that thing can rock.
You're doubting my guitar based on appearances?
Aren't you playing an air guitar?
Fair point.
I know it doesn't look like much, but the advantage of Les' guitar is that it's solid.
So no echo from inside it.
I call it the log.
Okay, look, I get it.
The big guitar manufacturers were also skeptical of Les' creation.
He tried to sell it to this company Gibson in 1946, but they passed on it.
Well, I was just ahead of my time.
A genius, a visionary, a guy with a log-shaped guitar.
It's a sound that sparkles, if you ask me.
The guitar companies eventually got wise, and even Gibson started using my designs.
Well, not the log design.
I added wings.
Oh, my guitar has wings, too.
It flies all over the place.
You know, once I even found it on the roof.
True story.
Not actual wings.
I just mean the shape.
They look more like shoulders than wings.
But wings sound cooler, don't you think?
They help my guitars look more guitar-ish and less log-ish.
Les' guitars are still really popular.
People still play them, even today.
And they still make that crystal clear Les Paul sound.
Yeah, but isn't rock and roll kind of like fuzzy and distorted?
Could these new solid guitars do that?
They definitely can.
But for a while, people didn't want it.
At first, it mostly happened by accident.
There's a famous song called Rocket 88 by a group called Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm.
Legend has it, in 1951, the guitarist his name was Willie Kisdart broke his amplifier on the way to a recording studio.
They didn't have time to get a new one, so they recorded it anyway.
And it ended up sounding like this.
Oh, that's a slick sound there.
Wowie.
No, that's Rocky.
Yeah.
No one had ever heard a sound like this before.
Some people think Rocket 88 was the first rock and roll song ever.
And people loved the sound so much that guitar makers made it easier to add fuzz to your guitar sound without having to bust up your equipment.
They made little pedals you step on that can add that fuzz, and even amplifiers that could switch between clear and distorted notes.
Pretty soon, this fuzzy rock and roll sound was everywhere and people loved it, especially teenagers.
Something about it just clicked with them.
Ugh, life is so hard.
No one has ever felt the way I, a teenager, feel right now.
It's like I'm angsty, yet full of energy, but also kind of dangerous and also fun-loving and nothing like my parents.
If only there was some form of popular entertainment that understood me, a teenager.
What is this music?
It's cool and tough and full of emotion, just like me, a teenager.
Wally?
What is that noise?
Turn that off right now.
Wait, hold up.
My parents don't like this music?
I love it!
Guitar was no longer the supporting instrument.
Now it was the star of the show.
Now I see, let's help pave the way for rock and roll.
Awesome work, dude.
You and the log are in.
Hot diggity dog.
But I feel like we're missing something, something now, something new, something fresh.
Funny you should mention that.
I do have one more person waiting to audition.
Hi, my name is Seema Cunningham.
I'm from Chicago, and I play in a band called OHM, O-H-M-M-E.
Awesome.
Seema, tell us about your guitar.
I play a white Fender Stratocaster.
It's got a couple cool hot rail pickups, which I really like because it kind of gives the guitar a real beefy, heavy sound.
Does it have a name?
A name?
A lot of musicians name their guitars.
It's a thing.
Sometimes I just call it my guy.
My guitar guy.
I call my air guitar Lima Bean.
No, Penny.
No, Alfonso.
No.
So, Seema, what drew you to the electric guitar?
I started playing guitar when I was about 12 years old and I really liked the guitar because it's such a mobile instrument.
You can carry it on your back and you can make sound and you can make chords just with the one instrument.
I think that's one of the great things about the guitar is that it's this infinite noise box.
Can you show us the range of sounds you can get from your guitar?
Yeah, well, the guitar itself, sometimes I do all different kinds of things.
Sometimes I play power chords.
Sometimes I play more open chords that are a little bit more pretty and a little more broken up, with a little more finger picking.
Sometimes I'm kind of doing like scratching along the neck or along the frets and like kind of making really choppy noises with it.
So You know, so that's what I do with the guitar.
But then a lot of the other noises I make through pedals.
So one of my favorite pedals is I have an analog delay pedal.
And what that does is essentially it gives you an echo and you can make that echo really short.
So it can be or it can be or it can be and it kind of lets you like dance around with the time.
Wow, okay, that is so cool.
I need to get some air pedals for my air guitar.
This is what I was looking for.
It must feel cool to be able to do so much with just one instrument.
Yeah, you just feel kind of magical and alive and you feel like your amplifier is kind of pushing you from behind and you're pushing back onto your guitar and the audience is responding to you and you're kind of getting lost in your guitar and also controlling it and it's just sort of this wonderful dance that makes you feel really powerful and excited.
Okay, you're in.
She's in, right?
Tell me she's in.
Totally.
Yeah, of course she's in.
Well, it looks like you found your last player, so my work here is done.
Good luck with the guitar castra.
Break a leg.
Awesome.
I think we're ready.
Leonore, Charlie, Les, Seema, and Joy?
Shall we do this?
Let's rock and roll.
Yeah.
All righteth.
Get ready for the show of a lifetime.
Guitars will shred.
Faces will melt.
Hearts will beat in four-four time.
Here we go!
One, two, three, four.
Wow!
What a concert!
The audience loved it!
They kept trying to cram more of the music into their ears!
I'm pretty sure they were covering their ears.
Hmm, could be.
We were very loud.
Yeah, but it was so fun.
And to think the guitar might have never caught on if it weren't for people like Charlie Christian, pioneering new ways to play, and Les Paul helping make new sounds.
Yeah, we'd all be listening to pianos or violins or horns.
Music would be totally different.
And you know what else would have never happened without these pioneers?
What?
No.
Air guitar!
Come on, solo with me, buddy.
Where you at, buddy?
I'm gonna do your piano.
That's a flute.
Yeah!
Rock on!
This episode was written by Grace Tatter, sound designed and engineered by Rachel Brees and mixed by Eric Romani.
It was produced by Tara Anderson, Molly Bloom, Anna Goldfield, Mark Sanchez, Kalaysha Toddy, Anna Wagle and Manika Wellham.
Fact-checking by Erica Janik.
We had engineering help from our editors, Shayla Farzan and Sandin Totten.
And our executive producer is Beth Perlman.
The executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavadi, Joanne Griffith, and Alex Shafford.
Special thanks to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Deanna Nebel University of Alabama, Birmingham historian, Andre Millard, for background information for this episode.
We had special guitar shredding by Johnny Vince Evans and voice acting by Vernon Neal and Rosie DuPont.
And special thanks to Annie Lesser and Amanda Jackson.
We'll be back next week with more explorations of the history that's all around us.
This time, what's the deal with lawns?
Until next time.
