Whether it’s a fire breathing riff from a Jimi Hendrix solo, or mind-bending weaves from a young player like Polyphia’s virtuoso Tim Henson, the sound of an electric guitar is so deeply enmeshed in us that it often associates with some of the great moments in our own lives. The haunting wail of an electric guitar is as familiar to us as drawing a breath, but what many might not know is that this sound had its genesis right here in our own backyard. Inventor George Beauchamp, from Coleman, Texas, was the first to devise a marketable electric axe, called a Rickenbacker. This development powered an ongoing, worldwide musical revolution.
Maybe they were singing “tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1899,” when George Beauchamp (pronounced “Bee-chum) entered the world on March 18, 1899. George was one of ten children born to Zybird and Myrtle Beauchamp, poor dirt farmers who lived near the Silver Valley and Novice area in Coleman County. By 1910 the Beauchamps were living in Tom Green County, and records show that George lived briefly in Wichita Falls in 1920.
George Beauchamp was an excellent musician, playing the violin and flat-top acoustic lap guitar in Vaudeville type shows. He moved to Los Angeles, California in the early 1920s to pursue a career in music. Beauchamp was one-half of a duo known as Grasshopper and George, and later part of a group called The Boys from Dixie. In an attempt to resolve the problem of the acoustic guitar being drowned out by the other instruments in the band, Beauchamp teamed up with a man named John Dopyera to build a guitar with steel plates and built-in speaker horns, which produced a louder sound. This endeavor was called National Steel Guitars. The two men contracted with a local engineer, Swiss immigrant Adolph Rickenbacher to build the guitars.
Beauchamp and Dopyera disagreed over business matters and split up. Dopyera continued to build and advance the design of the steel guitar, along with his brother Rudy. They called their new company Dopyera Brothers, or Do. Bro. for short. Today, the steel guitar is still popular, and is known as a Dobro. (Think of the line in the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “The Ballad of Curtis Lowe”: “I’ve got your drinking money, tune up your Dobro.”)
Meanwhile, George Beauchamp was exploring another way to make guitars louder, this time using electricity. In 1930, he attended night school and studied electronics. There he learned that a metal string vibrating in a magnetic field produced a disturbance to that field. He figured out how to wrap a coil of fine wire around a magnet, producing an electric current that could be fed to an amplifier to produce sound. Much trial and error ensued, but by 1932 Beauchamp built the very first working electric guitar, known as “the Frying Pan” because of its shape.
Beauchamp again joined up with Adolph Rickenbacher to build the electric guitars. The company was originally called the Ro-Pat-In Corporation, but later changed its name to Rickenbacher. In the Guitar & Amp Sourcebook, by Mike Abbott, Beauchamp’s role in the development of the electric guitar is amplified. “Although, there are many opinions about which company invented the electric guitar, the Frying Pan–made by the Ro-Pat-In Company, which became Electro String Instrument Corp., and finally Rickenbacker–was the first one to have a significant commercial appeal, and the first to influence almost every other guitar company at the time and for years to come,” Abbott wrote. “After a first year of disappointing sales, the Frying Pan became a big success and signaled the beginning of a new era of guitar manufacturing.”
One of the early adopters of the electric guitar was gospel and blues performer Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the 1940s. In the 1950s other blues musicians like T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King played electric guitars, mostly Gibsons, and helped make them popular. In Country and Western music, Chet Atkins was a maestro on the Gretsch electric guitar. Then in the late 50s, a skinny kid from Lubbock, Texas with a big nose and black horn-rimmed glasses named Buddy Holly played a Fender Stratocaster and made it popular, but the electric guitar exploded into true stardom with the arrival of the Beatles in 1964.
The Beatles’ American debut on the Ed Sullivan show featured John Lennon playing a Rickenbacker guitar (the spelling was now changed from “bacher” to “backer”). The next day, the phone rang off the wall at Rickenbacker Manufacturing, the builder of Beauchamp’s prototype electric guitar, and it has not stopped ringing yet. Soon, the electric guitar market was dominated by Gibson and Fender, as it still is today.
Rickenbacker was just a small, sleepy guitar maker in California, but their guitars were (and still are) top quality. Rickenbacker saw a marketing opportunity with the Beatles, and gave them another first from Rickenbacker: the electric 12-string guitar. They gave George Harrison the second electric 12-string they made. He loved it and played it a lot. Rickenbackers have their own unique sound, a chimey, jingle-jangle tone. You can hear it in many of the early Beatles songs like Ticket to Ride, A Hard Day’s Night, and You Can’t Do That. A young man in California named Roger McGuinn heard that sound, went out and bought a Rickenbacker 12-string, and that gave his band The Byrds their unique sound. You can hear that same jingle-jangle sound in many Byrds songs, such as “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
Today, electric guitars number in the millions around the world. Gibson and Fender still dominate the market, along with PRS, but there are too many brands to count. Electric guitars are used in all styles of music: rock, blues, jazz, country, gospel, soul, rhythm-and-blues, reggae, heavy metal, pop… you name it. The next time you feel in your soul the power of a satisfying electric riff, you’ll know that it all started with George Beauchamp, from Coleman County, Texas. There’s something gratifying about that. Beauchamp died in 1941 at the age of 42. He never lived to see how his invention tuned the world into a new musical channel, but his legacy will likely live on until the close of history itself.
[Story By Mike Blagg with Diane Adams]
