In Spain, where the guitar is said to have been invented some 500 years ago, there is a word used to describe the climax of a guitar solo: duende. In rock it usually occurs right after thesinger belts out a chorus as loudly and urgently as his lungs allow, then turns to the guitarist, screaming, "R-R-R-ROCK!" The guitarist charges into the spotlight with his gleaming Fender Telecaster or Les Paul Gold Top and promptly ignites a fire storm of sound. The instrument becomes an extension of his gyrating self, transforming him into a kind of spirit (which is what duende literally means), a spirit with the power to move its listeners to ecstasy as no words can, crying out for love and sex and gratification and sex and catharsis and sex. This is what the Spanish mean by duende -- and this is why the guitar is the seminal instrument of rock and roll. "When I was a kid there was no such thing as rock and roll," says Robbie Robertson, 48, the leader of The Band. "Then, all of a sudden, came puberty and girls, and then, it seemed, from every crack in the sidewalk came a hundred people, all playing rock and roll at once. The girls were screaming when guys played these guitars. And there I was, sitting with a guitar in my lap. It was perfect." Of course, as Robertson knows, the music didn't spring up overnight. Its roots southern, rural and thoroughly African American, and the sexually implicit in so much rock guitar comes from a profound heritage of musical longing: the blues. As Muddy Waters used to sing, The blues got pregnant, and they named the baby rock and roll.
Virtually all the sounds familiar to rock guitarists can be heard in embryonic form on pre-1940s records by the likes of Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Son House and Robert Johnson. Most of these virtuosos were dirt-poor and self-taught, and began with little more than homemade instruments and a compulsion to play. Even some contemporary blues men like Buddy Guy, 56, came to the music in the same way. "I lived on the bayou in Lettsworth, Louisiana, way out in the country," Guy says. "We had no electric lights, nothing. I had to make my first guitar. I took the screen wire off the window and stretched it from one nail to another over an empty lighter fluid can." Such a guitar was itself a statement of deprivation, a symbol of the yearnings -- social, sexual and spiritual -- that were the central themes of the early blues guitarists. By the late 1930s, however, their world was rapidly changing as waves of poor blacks migrated north in search of work in the big cities. Instead of playing on small-town street corners or in rural honky-tonks, the blues guitarists found themselves in large, crowded taverns and union halls, where they often had trouble making themselves heard. What they needed was a new instrument powerful enough to overcome any urban racket. And they soon found it: the electric guitar.(According to Tony Bacon, author of The Ultimate Guitar Book, "No one invented the electric guitar. Rather, the instrument evolved from a series of experiments and collaborations between musicians, makers and engineers, principally in the United States during the '30s and '40s.")
The first great blues guitarist to fully exploit this new instrument was Aaron Thibeaux "T Bone" Walker, who, as a boy in Dallas, guided Blind Lemon Jefferson up and down Central Avenue while the old man played for tips. As a performer, Walker was a revelation, anticipating the future: He strutted across the stage, doing splits, playing his guitar behind his back and strangling the strings until they screamed.Of the many electric blues guitarists who followed Walker, two tower above the rest: McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, and Chester "Howlin' Wolf" Burnett. They came to Chicago from the Deep South and played with much less technical reference than Walker or Robert Johnson. But their guitar was, paradoxically, more modern -- raw, loud, sexy and savage -- reflecting the rage, frustration and claustrophobia of urban life. One night in 1955 a young guitarist from St. Louis approached Muddy Waters at a club in Chicago. He introduced himself as Chuck Berry and asked to sit in with the band. It took only one song before Waters realized that Berry was no ordinary picker, and he immediately sent him to Chess records. There Berry unveiled a completely new sound, playing a country-inspired, blues-based barn burner of a song: "Maybellene." The guitar riff he pioneered in such later classics as "Johnny B. Goode" and "Sweet Little Sixteen," vigorously hammering the fretboard in boogie-woogie rhythm, is the closest thing to a definition of pure rock and roll. Not everyone agrees with Willie Dixon, the legendary songwriter-producer who called Berry "the first actual rock and roller," but no one disputes that he was the first great rock and roll guitarist.
Since then thousands of rock guitarists have embellished and even eclipsed Berry's sound. The competition among the best of them has always been furious -- and yet there is a remarkable consensus among musicians and critics as to who was the greatest who ever lived: the late Jimi Hendrix. It's almost impossible to explain Hendrix to anyone who's never heard him play, though another guitar giant, Frank Zappa, did a pretty good job of it in a 1968 article for LIFE. "The sound of his music is extremely symbolic: orgasmic grunts, tortured squeals, lascivious moans, electric disasters and innumerable other audial curiosities are delivered to the sense mechanisms of the audience at an extremely high decibel level. It is impossible to merely listen to...it eats you alive." In other words, Hendrix served up more duende, note for note, than any rock guitarist before him or since. He was at once outrageously original and the heir to a tradition as old as the guitar itself. Here's proof: In 1841, an Englishman named George Burrow described a visit to Spain where he was privileged to witness a guitarist named Sebastianillo performing at a gypsy wedding. "In a corner," wrote Burrow, "Sebastianillo [stood] strumming the guitar most forcibly and producing demoniacal sounds [while] men sprang high into the air, neighed, brayed and crowed." Think about it: If Burrow had seen Hendrix play the Fillmore East in 1969, he could have substituted "Jimi" for "Sebastianillo," and the same description would have applied.
In 1992 some of the world's greatest guitarists, including Les Paul, B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Carlos Santana and Robertson, performed in Seville, Spain, at the Guitar Legends Festival. "At the end of the evening," says Robertson, "we all came out on-stage and played with Les Paul. He invented the guitar that is the mainstay of so many musicians. We were playing this old Jimmy Reed song, "Baby, What You Want Me to Do?" Everybody was jamming, doing their thing, and Les nodded over to me to take a solo. I started playing these high, ringing harmonics. And Les was looking up at the sky, just following it with his ears as it was reverberating around the amphitheater, as if he was wondering: Where is that sound coming from? And I thought to myself: Isn't this funny? Years ago this man affected me in the same way. I'd look up into the sky and think: Where is that sound coming from?"
