The guitar is the voice of American popular music. How it got to be that way has a lot to do with Alpine yodelers, blackface minstrels and your great great grandmother. The blues and "hillbilly" string band music are the immediate ancestors of country music, R&B and rock & roll, but the guitar juggernaut that streaked through the twentieth century, and still is going strong in the twenty-first, was launched before the Civil War in urban parlors and on New York stages.

Join us for an excursion through the neglected nineteenth century, when “guitar fever” first seized America.