Famous? Yes, in their way. They were guitar heros before the term existed. Guitar has always had heros. I do not know why. Maybe because it is so personal and is something that can be carried. Yet I do not know of any flute heros in that tradition.
Segovia was a guitar hero, as were Tarrega, Sor, Guliani and Aguado before him. They all predated the electric guitar. Segovia lived far into the electronic age when electric guitars took over the popular imagination, yet he remained a guitar god up to and beyond his death near the advent of the home computer/internet age. Other guitar gods live on, as well. Les Paul and Jimi Hendrix are not going anywhere soon.
There is no doubt Segovia was the first international guitar hero. His stage was the entire world purposely. He had to bring the guitar to glory. He had to divorce it from a past he saw as ugly and demeaning to the instrument. Unfortunately, really, a single word symbolized this ugly past in Segovia's vocabulary--flamenco. Drunks who played and danced in the streets went by that name too. Because of what he had seen and heard while growing up and because that word had been used around him repeatedly as an instance of low culture, Segovia adopted this usage. As in his childhood, that word remained code for low culture.
A century removed from Segovia's original battleground, it is diffucult for us now to appreciate his need for such separation of cultures. Who was this stuffy crank, we are apt to ask? But we are used to the guitar and have fully accepted it as a concert instrument and more, we are used to world music and every kind of fusion of cultures expressed musically. Segovia was before all that. By the time radio was half out of the womb he was a full master embarked on his destiny already the old fashioned way of touring. His aunt and uncle (he had been abandoned by his mother at four years of age) had gone so far as to state that guitar was not a suitable instrument for him to learn because it was the instrument of ragged street gypsies and drunken flamenco artists. Much of his bias symbolized by the word had been instilled early.
In an interview I watched, Segovia later praised the beauty of the best flamenco traditions. By that time his mission was an unqualified success on all fronts. The war was not nearing its end, the war had been won. Segovia recognized all things of beauty. From listening to him play, from reading about him, from watching numerous documetaries and interviews, one gains the sense of how very intelligent Segovia was. I read on one of his album jackets as a kid that his intelligence and cultivation made it easy to envision his success in other fields such as diplomacy or education, had he not chosen the elevation of the guitar as his mission. I think this appears true.
Make no mistake, the guitar heros were coming in a big way, whether Segovia was ever born or not. The world is fortunate and Segovia is fortunate that he came just prior to the electronic age, but by virtue of a long life and career his reputation remained parallel to it and was enhanced by it. He spread his word like no other had been able to before him. Like I said, I think the world is lucky that Segovia got in these licks for guitar as a concert instrument just prior to the guitar's second revolution. A guitar revolution was coming anyway, but without Segovia to lift the guitar to the highest levels of traditional concert and classical music, the world would have a different outlook on guitar. It would still be a positve outlook, I believe, but it would certainly be a different one than we have because of Segovia.
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You mean that was just a little preface to guitar heros? I started out talking about Los Indios Tabajaras, and how they were guitar heros stemming from a different tradition.
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A guitar hero has to have his signature sound that is instantly recognizable, something that seems to make him imitable, a handle, something unique about his sound.
Picture late 1970's Summit county Colorado, and me having to literally pull the car over to the side of the road because on the radio was a new sound of guitar. It was Dire Straits on Sultans of Swing. That was a new and beautiful sound for rock guitar. Mark Knopfler became a guitar god. He did not sound like anyone else. One reason was that he was using a largely untried technique on electric guitar. This was long before such rock guitar gods as Jeff Beck converted so thoroughly to fingerstyle that they practically forgot they ever played with a pick.
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Originally Posted by Danik 2016
