The Electric Guitarists of the 1930s

From Alvino Rey to Charlie Christian

Alvino Rey courtesy Lynn Wheelwright Collection

While Alvino Rey’s name is not widely known today, in the 1930s he was at the forefront of promoting the electric guitar. Lynn Wheelwright, an early electric guitar authority who now owns Charlie Christian’s ES-250, worked as Rey’s guitar tech for many years. “Alvino is best known for his ‘talking guitar’ and as the father of the pedal steel,” Wheelwright explains, “but he was so much more. He should be known as the ‘Godfather of the Electric Guitar.’ He was a very early advocate of the technology. He was playing electric banjo with Phil Spitalny’s Orchestra in New York in late 1928.”

Five years later the Ro-Pat-In company applied its newly developed pickup technology to the first solidbody electric guitar. This Hawaiian steel guitar was nicknamed the “Frying Pan” due to its odd shape, which resembled a frying pan with a round body and long handle-like neck. The prototype Frying Pan was made of wood, but the production models, introduced in the fall of 1932, were cast aluminum. (In 1933 Ro-Pat-In changed its name to Electro String Instrument Company and created the “Richenbacher Electro” badge that began appearing on its pegheads. Today the company is known as Rickenbacker.)

By October 1932 Alvino Rey was playing his “Frying Pan” on his twice-daily radio show out of San Francisco. He also used a standard-shaped, plank-model Vivi-Tone electric guitar, plugged straight into the radio station’s console. It’s likely Rey was the first to play an electric guitar player on coast-to-coast radio broadcasts.

Wheelwright credits Rey as being the first to put “this newfangled electric gadget, which at the time was considered an expensive parlor trick, into use and into the ears of the public. He made it acceptable and proved to other musicians as well as bandleaders that it had a legitimate place on the bandstand. Alvino was the most important electric guitar player of the early- to mid-1930s. When Gibson was looking to get into the electric market, they enlisted Alvino’s help in May 1935. He was the first official electric guitar endorser for any company and one of the highest paid front men for any band – and all with an electric guitar.”

Soon after its introduction, the sound of the electric Hawaiian guitar made its debut on Victor 78s by Noe Lane’s Hawaiian Orchestra. Their initial session, in New York City on February 22, 1933, produced six sides. Bandleader Noelani “Joseph” Lopez, whose last name was sometimes spelled as “Lopes,” had been performing on an acoustic steel guitar since at least the mid-1920s. The session’s final selection, the steel guitar solo “Hawaiian Love-Waltz,” is likely the first commercially available recording of electric guitar. In September 1933, Noe Lane’s Hawaiian Orchestra made additional records featuring an electrified Hawaiian steel guitar. By 1934 other Hawaiian musicians – notably Andy Iona and His Islanders and Sol Hoopii – were using amplified steel guitars.

In 1935, the first Western swing records featuring electric guitars hit the market. That January, Milton Brown’s Musical Brownies made stellar recordings with Bob Dunn’s electrified slide guitar prominently featured in the mix. In his youth, Dunn had seen a Hawaiian group performing in Oklahoma, and he’d subscribed to Walter Kolomoku’s Hawaiian guitar correspondence lessons. His instrument at the Musical Brownies sessions was a heavily modified round-hole acoustic. “The Martin O-series model acoustic he cradled in his lap was anything but typical,” wrote country music historian Rich Kienzle. “A Volo-Tone pickup was mounted over the soundhole, and a wire ran from the pickup to a small, nondescript amplifier. The Martin’s strings had been raised to permit Hawaiian-style playing. Among the songs he used it on that day were ‘Chinatown, My Chinatown,’ ‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’ ‘St. Louis Blues,’ and his own composition, ‘Taking Off,’ which has since become a Western swing standard.”