Talk:Parlor guitar

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"The defining feature in terms of classification is that of a concert or below".

Could someone please explain what a 'concert' in this context is ? I clicked on the link but only got the 'live performance' definition. 84.130.108.136 21:21, 17 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

First use of "Parlor"[edit]

The term "parlor guitar" does not seem to have been used before 1964 or so. To try to find out when people started saying "parlor guitar", I've done some searching of various online sources. Google Books search does not turn up the term "parlor guitar" or "parlour guitar" before 1964. The 1964 reference is in the New Lost City Ramblers Song Book by John Cohen and Mike Seeger, on page 14. Unfortunately Google Books doesn't show an image of the page. [Any of you have this book to look in?] Some of the 1970's references refer to "parlor guitar music" and "parlor guitar style", not necessarily referring to the size of the instrument.

Here is a 1971 collection of the "Old Time Music" newsletter, with a screen shot. It's hard to tell from the context, but it appears to be more about playing guitar in a parlor than the size of the instrument. The same may be true of the New Lost City Ramblers Song Book 1964 reference above: Mike Seeger, one of the authors of the book, was very active in the "Old Time Music" world.

I've done the same search on the New York Times archive, which goes back to to 1851. It includes the advertisements in older papers. There are plenty of references to "parlor organ" or "parlor organs" starting in 1855, and the first ones are in advertisements. But "parlor guitar" is not mentioned in the NY Times until 2001.

I have also looked through a bunch of old musical instrument catalogs you can find here. None of them use the term "parlor guitar".

My own surmise about all this is that since smaller guitars were regular guitars during the time they were played in parlors, there was no reason to label them as such. It's now necessary to distinguish smaller guitars from the typical dreadnought or OM, and so the term came into common use. "Parlor organ" is a good example of similar coinage: there were big organs, and then there were smaller organs that were appropriate for a parlor, so the term started being used. Calling a guitar an "acoustic guitar" wasn't necessary until electric guitars were invented, so old catalogs will of course not refer to "acoustic guitars". Same for typewriters: the term "manual typewriter" needed to be coined to distinguish them from electric typewriters.

Agroten (talk) 15:08, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Very interesting, thank you! Maikel (talk) 00:01, 21 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]