The “Coffee Shop” sign had hung outside the storefront only a few hours when a woman walked in carrying a guitar case and asked when open mic night was.
“Open a coffee shop,” the proprietor said, “and the guitars come rolling in.”
This anecdote attests to the popularity of the guitar, as do the stories of countless garage bands, boy bands, girl groups, dad bands, cover bands – not to mention world-class supergroups – in the history of popular music.
The guitar is so popular that, chances are, you know someone who plays the instrument, even if only once in a while, after digging the instrument out from the back of the closest, creaking open the case and plucking out the tune from “Stairway to Heaven” on whatever strings hold their tune.
For true guitar fans, there’s no more visually striking tour of guitar history and legend than photographer Eleanor Jane’s Superstar Guitars (Welbeck, 2024). The oversized volume is the ultimate guitar aficionado’s coffee table book, packed with hundreds of color photos of the instruments that helped define popular music.
You’ll meet Mississippi Delta bluesman Bukka White’s 1933 Duolian – with handwritten set list taped to its back, Bob Dylan’s 1964 Fender Stratocaster, Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock Stratocaster, Prince’s “Yellow Cloud,” Kurt Cobain’s 1969 Fender Mustang of “Smells like Teen Spirit” fame, Phoebe Bridgers’ Danelectro 56 Baritone and dozens of other legendary instruments.
And while the origin stories of these iconic instruments bring readers into historic moments in music history, it’s the visual storytelling of Jane’s photographs that puts readers finger-to-neck with the guitars the world’s most famous strummers made sing.
You can almost feel the scratches gouged into the body of Woody Guthrie’s 1836 Martin and the brittle edges of the chipped paint on George Harrison’s 1964 Gibson. You can almost pull the stickers off Rivers Cuomo’s Warmoth. And the close-ups of Jimmy Garcia’s “Tiger” (built by Doug Irwin) make the instrument’s inlaid namesake animal seem so real you could almost tussle with it.
“I’ve always tried to treat the guitars I shoot as beautiful objects and historic pieces, but not in a staid, clinical way,” Jane writes in her foreword to Superstar Guitars. This collection of photos puts meat on the bones of these fabled instruments.
If musical instruments could speak, oh, the stories these guitars would tell.
