Amplified

On the last night of 1942, Langston Hughes heard Memphis Minnie play an electric guitar on top of an icebox in a Chicago club, and could only compare the sound to a steel mill. Eighty years later, Rolling Stone ranked Sister Rosetta Tharpe among the six greatest guitarists who ever lived. Between those two moments lies a history the textbooks largely forgot.Amplified tells it in full: a century of African American women who picked up the instrument everyone said was not theirs, and changed American music with it. From Beale Street corners and Arkansas tent revivals to late-night television, the Super Bowl stage and the heavy-metal circuit, here are the stars, the sidewomen and the vanished voices on shellac, restored to the record, from Memphis Minnie, Elizabeth Cotten and Odetta to Barbara Lynn, Tracy Chapman, Brittany Howard and H.E.R.Rigorously researched and vividly told, with twenty-five photographs, endnotes, a chronology and fifty essential recordings, Amplified is both a celebration and a correction: a book for listeners, for players, and for anyone who has ever wondered who really invented the sound.