George Barnes – the first electric guitarist

George Barnes the best guitarist you (thought) you never heard

Listen to George Barnes through the years

(Revisions July 1, 2016)

When George Barnes was 17 he was hired by NBC for their WLS Chicago affiliate and became the youngest conductor and arranger in the network’s history.

When I was 17 George Barnes died of a sudden heart attack. He was 56.

That same year I discovered a double-album at the local Public Library called The Guitar Album, featuring a list of names I had never heard of. It turned out to be from a 1971 concert of Jazz guitarists at Town Hall in New York City. Being a rock fan, there was very little of interest on it for me.

Then, I heard the duets of George Barnes and Bucky Pizzarelli. I was enthralled with the musicality of the tunes, the breathtaking licks, the slower passages of glistening, liquid tone. For some reason I assumed the suave, James Bond looking guy with the colorful name must have been doing all the exquisite lead playing. Only later did I realize it was the squat, cigar-chomping George Barnes who was tripping the light fandango in such a transcendent manner.

He had a lot of practice, as it turned out.

George Barnes – Whiz Kid

/>It is believed that Barnes was the first person to play an electrically amplified guitar, wired up by his brother when George was 10 years old. He joined the Musicians Union at age 12 and at 16 he became among the first to record with an electric guitar, on a March 1, 1938 waxing of two Big Bill Broonzy performances.

According to John Fordham, senior Jazz critic for the Guardian, “In 1932, a musician called Gage Brewer began performing on one of the first electrically amplified Hawaiian guitars. The idea soon appealed to guitarists rendered almost inaudible in big swing bands, but six years passed before a jazz guitarist, George Barnes, first recorded on a Spanish instrument with magnetic pick-ups in 1938.” The claim that Barnes was first has been challenged by others. But Barnes was certainly among the very first to embrace the electric guitar as more than a novelty.

A master of touch and tone, Barnes could play any style required as a hired gun. He spent his adolescence recording with the top Chicago bluesmen and playing on NBC’s popular show, National Barn Dance, where he pioneered the sound that was copied later by many Country and Western guitarists, and earned his place in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.

While he always enjoyed playing country music, his true forte is a mixture of whimsical Swing and elegant Jazz, which retain their bluesy roots but are a far cry from the Grand Ole Opry.

Drafted in 1942, his trained ear allowed him to become the first person among half a million candidates to get a perfect score on the Army’s Morse Code speed test. He spent the remainder of the war in the basement of the Pentagon, transcribing enemy code.

Barnes returned to Chicago in 1946, where ABC gave him a live 15 minute time slot, with complete artistic control over a new octet that gained him many fans, including Bing Crosby, who asked Barnes to join his band in 1947. But, according to the guitarist’s daughter, Alexandra Barnes Leh, “Dad wanted to make solo recordings, not back up a crooner.”
;_blank"">Standard Transcriptions” was once a hard-to-find collectable record, but now all 48 cuts may be downloaded for less than $20 at Amazon.com.
Decca Records’ Milt Gabler heard Barnes on the radio and signed him to a comprehensive recording contract. In May 1951 he moved to New York City, the recording capital of the world at that time. There he began to make his solo recordings, as well as appearing on countless other records as a studio top gun.

Les Paul, Charlie Christian, Merle Travis, Herb Ellis, and Chet Atkins have all cited Barnes as a major influence.

George Barnes played on more recording dates for more people than any musician in the union’s files. He appeared on some 100 Blues records in the 1930s alone and the 1950s found him on another 100 albums of everyone from Frank Sinatra to Louis Armstrong to Homer & Jethro. He was even the first person to play an electric guitar on a Bob Dylan recording (the unreleased 1962 track, Mixed-Up Confusion) and he played electric bass guitar on the album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

However, Barnes was never content strumming away in the typical rhythm section that permeated popular music, so he continued to forge a career as a featured soloist, leading combos of various sizes. Still, he remains unknown to many and only recently has some of his best music made it into the digital world.

The Guitars

For the most part, Barnes played Gibson guitars throughout the 1940s and 1950s. That was all to change in 1960.
>In the words of Alexandra Barnes Leh, “Al Dronge, the president of Guild Guitars, courted Dad at the suggestion of Guild player Carl Kress. Dad said he’d go with Guild if they’d build two guitars according to his designs: the Guitar in F (so he could write guitar parts as if he were writing for a horn section) and the George Barnes Acousti-Lectric (so he could play one guitar acoustically and electrically).”