I've been thinking more and more about people and their relationships with their guitars (and their guitar-adjacent instruments), and what happens when those relationships break up. Or more specifically, when guitars get broken, and those broken guitars break hearts.

There are different kinds of guitar breakage. Sometimes breaking a guitar is the thing ya gotta do to make a point. Then again, sometimes guitars break when you don't want them to break.

This one runs from the ancient suburbs of Cairo to the stages of London, Leeds, and the Monterey Pop Festival. I also explore a work by the artist Christian Marclay, who destroyed a guitar to tell a heartbreaking story.

And I couldn't help adding four stories of guitars that broke my own heart.

All of that in under 30 minutes? I'm dedicated to making the most of your podcast listening time, and you're welcome.

If YOU have any stories of broken guitars that broke your heart (or guitars you broke to make a point) I want to hear them. Tell that story to your phone, send that audio file to me at aphotguitar@gmail.com, and with your permission I'll include them in future episodes.

I like this one. I hope you do, too.

Support the project here!

This episode is about Lutes.

Not the Lute we know, but the Lutes we call Lutes that aren't the Lute we know, which came before the Lute we know, which is a Lute that led to the guitar...which is also a Lute. The episode spans a couple of thousand years, and thousands of miles, to paint a picture of ancestors of the guitar that were common among many ancient peoples, and which connected the musical cultures of the ancient middle east, the near east, and the far east, via the Silk Roads.

There's a little sex, and a pinch of violence, and I had a ridiculous amount of fun making this episode, which is part of the reason it took me so f++king long to produce. Enjoy, and learn something in the process.

Support the project here!

From The Lyres of Ur in episode 10, this episode takes us 1,000 years into the future, and 1,000 miles to the west of Mesopotamia, to ancient Egypt. Once we're there, we'll find a 3,500 year-old musical instrument, played by the in-house musician of the architect and polymath, Sen-en-Mut, who was in the employ of the first female Pharoah, Hat-Shepsut.

Sen-en-Mut's favorite musician was named Har-Mose. His instrument was a type of Lute, and it was buried at his side. This accident of history meant that this ancient, delicate instrument, made of wood and animal byproducts, survived the centuries, alongside the stone pyramids and temples of ancient Egypt.

The Lute of Har-Mose is the second-oldest extant string musical instrument in the world. The way it was designed, constructed, and played makes it a critical step in the long history of people and their guitars: it's not just a distant cousin of the guitar, it's almost a kind of prototype. It points us directly to the guitar, and the episodes to come, when we'll move through the ancient world and the Middle East, to North Africa and southern Europe, as we continue to follow the trail of the guitar's DNA and the cultures it helped to create.

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Click here to support A People's History of the Guitar! Even $4/month, or a one-time contribution, goes a long way. If you want to see where this goes as much as I do, it'll help me build this project, create more episodes, license music, conduct interviews, and reach more people.

I'm always interested in direct feedback and ideas, so get in touch at aphotguitar@gmail.com.

In this episode we uncover the oldest existing examples of the kinds of string instruments that led to the guitar. They're called The Lyres of Ur, they're over 4,000 years old, and they were discovered in the 1930s by someone with the best name ever for a British archaeologist, alongside his extremely interesting wife. Filled with a couple of distractingly curious side-stories, this episode also speculates about how those ancient instruments might have introduced distortion to the sonic palette of string instruments. Trust me, you'll find it to be a fun and interesting way to spend 25 minutes of your life.

Click here to support A People's History of the Guitar! Even $5/month, or a one-time contribution, goes a long way. If you want to see where this goes as much as I do, it'll help me build this project, create more episodes, license music, conduct interviews, and reach more people.

No paywalls yet, but when exclusive content starts to appear, anyone contributing any amount in 2025 and 2026 (monthly or one-time) will have lifetime access to everything. Thanks for listening and for thinking about supporting A People's History of the Guitar.

Get in touch at aphotguitar@gmail.com

Episode nine about the word guitar. That's not bad grammar, its a question: what is the origin of the word, guitar?

It's an odd word with deep roots, and the evolution of the word tracks with the evolution of the instrument itself. Join me for a slightly speculative, and ultimately inconclusive, exploration of one word that might have come from more than one place, because no word comes out of no-where.

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Learn about how to support the project here!

Check out all previous episodes below. Episodes appear in order of publication (oldest first rather than newest first) because that's how I want it, ya know? Anyway, to get a clearer sense of what this thing is about and where its going, start with episode one, below, and listen in order. But feel free to bounce around as much as you like, because you can do that without any interference from me. But maybe at least listen to Episodes one and five, OK?

Episode related playlist on the way!

This episode goes off-road a little. I'm late to the party, but when I recently (finally) saw Ryan Coogler's Sinners, I couldn't not do an episode on this movie. Sinners is a cracking good vampire movie that also happens to be a micro-history of Black Music, with details that can tell us a lot about the history of string instruments in the United States. Its about the guitar, people and their guitars, and the guitar and its people...even if some of those people aren't people anymore.

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Learn about how to support the project here!

Check out all previous episodes below. Episodes appear in order of publication (oldest first rather than newest first) because that's how I want it, ya know? Anyway, to get a clearer sense of what this thing is about and where its going, start with episode one, below, and listen in order. But feel free to bounce around as much as you like, because you can do that without any interference from me. But maybe at least listen to Episodes one and five, OK?

Episode related playlist on the way!

This is the second in a short series of episodes and interviews about that thing we made, that if we hadn't made, there would be no guitar.

Episode six is about how we learned to make a string and pull it tight between two fixed points to make a weapon. The bow and arrow changed the way we lived, ate, and killed each other. And the bow part of the bow and arrow might be a prototype for future stringed musical instruments (chordophones). That's because until we taught ourselves how to make string, and pull it tight enough to do something, we would never have learned to pull those strings tight enough to make pitched sounds when we pluck, strum, and bow them.

Without tensioned strings there are no bows and arrows. Without bows and arrows, there are no harps, lyres, lutes, shoelaces, or Diddley Bows. And there are no guitars. So let's travel from an obscure book from 1899 back to a hunter on a grassy plain 65,000 years ago, to a guitar player in New York in 1978, and think about why and how each of our guitar strings might have an ancient weapon inside of it.

Click here to support A People's History of the Guitar with a one-time or recurring contribution, or maybe both. If you want to see where this goes as much as I do, you can help me to produce unique new content and reach more people with a broader perspective on an instrument that changed the world.

Go back and check out the previous episodes in order if you haven't already, because this thing is initially best understood if you go from first to last. Thanks for being curious about what I'm trying to do here.

This is the first in a short series of episodes and interviews about how we turned cordage into chordage.

According to the Hornbostel-Sachs System for Musical Instrument Classification, the guitar is in the Chordophone category. And it wouldn't be there if it weren't for something we found, and manufactured, over tens of thousands of years, called cordage.

The story of cordage is under-told and overlooked, but it's everywhere, and it's one of our most important tools and materials. We take it for granted, but we shouldn't do that. It holds your shoes together. It's the stuff your clothes are made of. It's the thing that burns in the center of a candle. One type of cordage, called string, turns silent bows, boxes and slabs into stringed musical instruments, and that's why we're here.

Here's a link to a complete interview with a scholar mentioned in the episode, which should make for good supplemental reading.

Click here to support A People's History of the Guitar with a one-time or recurring contribution, or maybe both. If you want to see where this goes as much as I do, you can help me to produce unique new content and reach more people with a broader perspective on an instrument that changed the world.

Go back and check out the previous episodes in order if you haven't already, and thanks for being curious about what I'm trying to do here.