Driven By Her: Guitar Heroes

Ongoing History of New Music

Once upon a time, musical instruments were divided into two groups: those appropriate for women to play and everything else...

That first group was very small...playing the piano was considered feminine...the violin?...yes, providing it was done gently and with ladylike comportment...and then—well, that’s about it...

Drums?...forget it...too physical and sweaty...brass instruments were out...in fact, so were all wind instruments, not even the flute...however, the acoustic guitar was okay...it wasn’t very loud and produced tones delicate enough to be appropriate for a young lady to play...

This, of course, was silly...women had been doing amazing things with guitars stretching back to the invention of what became the modern acoustic guitar back in the early 1800s..and we can go back through the stringed instruments in history: the lute, the kithara, the chartar, the tanbur, the oud, the mandolin, the cittern, and so on...women played all of them—although we know almost nothing about them...

That’s the way it was for decades...and let’s not even talk about the electric guitar...even as late as the 1980s, there was this sexist attitude that girls just couldn’t play like the boys...they did not know how to rock out with a Les Paul or a strat or whatever...

In 2003, Rolling Stone published a list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time...you know how many women were on that list?...two...two!

Today we know that’s crazy...there are plenty of excellent guitars with double-x chromosomes...and thanks to them, people are exploring the history of the guitar heroine, women advanced the cause of the six-string, public preconceptions be damned...

This is a look back at the women who made the guitar sing...

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