Who invented the guitar solo?
In the film Soul, Disney took the ambitious move to try and define the meaning of life and our internal desires in a family-friendly 90-minute animation. In doing so, they created something called ‘the zone’, a plane of existence between the physical and the metaphysical world. It is somewhere people go in a moment where they are so into something that they become disconnected from their bodies. If this place were real, we would all have different ways to get there, but a universal trigger would almost certainly be a good guitar solo.
There is something about the guitar solo which has never truly been defined. In songs like ‘Hotel California’, everyone who has ever heard that song, regardless of how they feel about it, from the moment it starts, is waiting for the line “…but you can never leave…” as they know what comes next. They close their eyes, lie back, and enter the zone when it happens.
The guitar solo has been made incredibly popular in genres such as blues, jazz and rock, and we generally associate it with the electric guitar. There is no definitive answer to who was the first musician to do this, but it was popularised by the likes of Lonnie Johnson, Muddy Waters, and T-Bone Walker. Ernest Tubb’s hit in the ‘40s, ‘Walking the Floor over You,’ that was the first popular song to have a guitar solo feature, but that wasn’t the first known instance of a guitar solo.
Realistically, ever since the instrument’s invention, it has been used in solo compositions, which are technically guitar solos. How we know it now carries connotations of the above-referenced genres, but there is more history to it than that.
Did classical music have solos?
While classical music didn’t have guitar solos in the way we know them now, guitarists playing extended pieces on their own or with background accompaniment certainly existed. For instance, many classical guitarists would play concertos, which are solos written to be performed with an orchestra in the background.
Equally, many early guitarists would write compositions that just use the guitar. There was no backing from anybody else; in that sense, they are the purest form of the guitar solo. All new music borrows from the old, and as such, despite there being a disconnect between a classical concerto and Jimmy Page’s iconic shredding on ‘Stairway To Heaven’, there certainly is a link.
Who is the best guitar soloist?
If this question had an easy answer, it would have been answered already. The beautiful thing about a guitar solo is that it can take on various forms, and its adaptability has meant it is still just as relevant today as it was at the birth of the guitar.
A lot of people believe the best guitarists are the ones who can play at speed. In that sense, people like Eddie Van Halen and Angus Young are some of the best, as the shredding style they apply to their music is incredibly quick and exciting. This certainly is good to watch, but depending on who you ask, it might not be considered the best kind of guitar solo.
Some people prefer melody in their solos, and in that sense, older blues guitarists like BB King and Buddy Guy are the best. Without a doubt, though, despite a lot of subjectivity involved in deciding who the best soloist is, some names always stand out.
Jimmy Page, Slash, Chet Atkins, Eric Clapton and Prince are often mentioned, but Jimi Hendrix was one of the most pioneering guitar soloists ever. The fact that he was only a mainstream musician for around four years before his untimely death tells you everything you need to know about his ability and the legacy he has left behind.
Hendrix was brilliant at not only playing fantastic solos but also mastering the art of showmanship, improvisation, and ingenuity with his guitar knowledge. Consider tracks like ‘Machine Gun’ where he used the guitar to mimic the sound of gunfire or his famous performance of ‘Star Spangled Banner’ where he used the instrument to perform a distortion-laden rendition of his country’s national anthem.
When picking who the best guitarist is, no answer is right, but anyone who throws names around and doesn’t mention Hendrix is certainly wrong.
