The electric guitar has long been a symbol of artistic prowess and cultural rebellion, primarily associated with male guitar legends such as Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, and Jimmy Page. This prevalent gender disparity in electric guitar culture has perpetuated the belief that men not only pioneered its creation but have also historically dominated it. However, this perception is challenged by the notable contribution of women to the field. From iconic figures such as Memphis Minnie and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, to trailblazers such as Jennifer Batten and Bonnie Raitt, women have defied conventional expectations related to gender, culture, and class, while utilizing their guitars as instruments of personal expression. This investigation delves into the contributions, struggles, and achievements of women players, shedding light on their vital role in shaping the history of the electric guitar. It is conducted through the lens of guitarist Sue Foley, who sought inspiration from these heroines to light her own path while navigating the rugged landscape of electric guitar culture. Foley has invested decades of research into interviewing female guitarists, studying and learning the styles and methods of many of the pioneering women guitar players, while pursuing her career as a professional blues guitarist and recording artist.

Chapter Seven focuses on African-American representations of transiency. Black transients suffered from the same problems of poverty and hunger as whites but they had to contend with the added problems of racial discrimination and state-sanctioned violence. They were also, to varying degrees, barred from hobohemian subculture. Black transients were entirely excluded, for example, from the publishing market for book-length hobo memoirs. This chapter seeks out representations of transiency in black vernacular music, particularly, though not exclusively, the blues. I argue that examining the lyrical content of black vernacular music changes the cultural representation of the hobo because blues is more sexually explicit, contains more examples of female empowerment, and places a stronger emphasis on the road as a place of violence than do white written accounts. The romanticisation of the road that is common in white hobo memoirs is largely absent from black vernacular music, in which concerns about needing to leave town, often to escape an awkward romantic situation but sometimes to escape from the violence of the railroad police, loom large.

When rock and roll exploded onto the American cultural mainstream in the 1950s, enthusiasts and detractors alike identified the backbeat as the most distinctive and captivating feature of this controversial ‘new’ music. Although it shocked many, the backbeat soon became ubiquitous, and it remains among the most prevalent features in contemporary popular music around the globe. Long before the rock and roll revolution, backbeating had a rich history in the performance of African-American music, dance, worship, labour, and sexuality. This chapter establishes the backbeat as a pervasive and powerful manifestation of signifyin(g), as theorized by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, a strategic form of cultural production that responds to, reinterprets, and builds upon received texts or expressions to expose, challenge, and invert the hierarchies they (re)produce. The origins of the backbeat are traced to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African-American musical traditions – including worship music, prison songs, early jazz, and hokum blues – and its early history is charted through a critical survey of recordings from the 1920s to the 1950s. This history reveals that the backbeat often functioned as a means of resisting oppressive social structures and forging group solidarity, and it illuminates how and why the backbeat became a central convention of drum kit performance practice.

An argument about the interpretation of black atlantic music is used here to articulate a joyful and shamelessly sentimental response to the dry defaults of ‘afropessimist’ thinking. An extended discussion of the relationship between music and freedom provides a means to explore the possibility of a dissident politics of culture articulated in terms derived from the vexed history of organised musical sound.