Banjeaurine & Oud

Among guitar players, I'm probably at about the national average: five chords, two Beatles songs, one Dylan number, "Natural Mystic" and "This Land is Your Land" all down cold. This makes me the perfect candidate to enjoy Tim Brookes' new book, but both the more experienced strummer and the utter novice will also find it engaging.

In Guitar, Tim Brookes explains how the instrument became the standard, and why rockers aren't jamming out on, say, the banjeaurine, a five-stringed banjo with a short scale. For that matter, he muses, what makes a guitar a guitar and not one of its fretted near cousins?

A longtime NPR personality, Brookes' writing has the whimsical tone associated with public radio: "We half-forget that recorded music is little more than a postcard of live music. Live music is a human encounter, with all the opportunities for human intensity, drama, conflict, and suffering."

There's a bit of storyteller hokiness, but Brookes really does know how to construct a narrative and keep it flowing along. His book is arranged as two interwoven plots. One is a historical narrative following the origins of the guitar in this country and the cultural and individual influences that guided its evolution. The other is a more personal tale of the crafting of own guitar by a commissioned craftsman in rural Vermont.

In reporting on his own search for a new instrument and all the choices he makes-the model to be built, the type of wood, the inlay design-he shows how an instrument is built and how its build affects the sound it will produce.

One of the strengths of a book covering the guitar's development in the U.S. is that it can portray the host of outrageous, loveable and generally unlikely characters who had a hand in the process. In addition to his fine-tuned analyses, Brookes doesn't skimp on anecdotes. He recounts Hank Williams' steel guitar player's shaking experience:

"We was playing a dance at a juke joint, and there was a poppin' sound and someone come up and said there was a fella out there shootin' with a gun. Directly, he come in. He was wearin' overalls-no shirt-and he had a big ol' loaded pistol and one of them bullets hit a heater and ricocheted 'round the room. Man, you talk about huntin' a table. Lum run into the girls' toilet-Hank had to go and get him out."

Brookes keys in on a handful of the exciting moments when a tweak of fate brought the guitar into a new phase in build, playing style, location or popularity. He provides a tremendous description of how the steel-string got to Hawaii (in the hands of Portuguese naval survivors from a merchant vessel wrecked by a Confederate man-o-war); how it was modified to accommodate the aesthetics and conventions of Hawaiian music; how the lap-steel, with its trademark twanging slide, came into being; and how that instrument and sound spread up north to the continental 48 and was again modified and developed.

One of the intriguing questions that the book poses is whether the old guitar is in its final shape or just in another phase of its evolution. Another is: Will the instrument as we know it remain at number one or will the kids be playing air oud a few decades down the line?