From Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama: how electric guitarists challenge expectations of gender

I’ve been playing a 1963 Maton FyrByrd guitar since I was 14 years old. It’s Australian designed and made with the unique sharkbite body, and pickups named cool, midway and hi-fi.

With only 1,160 of this model produced between 1962 and 1965, it’s a rarity. But so too is its provenance. In lieu of jewellery, cabinet crystal or other family heirlooms, I inherited my mother’s electric guitar.

The electric guitar is synonymous with rock'n'roll genres emerging from the 1950s. It’s also become one of the most potent icons of masculine heroism in popular music culture. Stereotypical imagery circulates around riffs, shredding and posturing.

The wailing guitar solo has become a signature feature of virtuosity, a spotlight of grandeur setting the male guitarist apart from the band with a distinctive textural line.

These characteristics mean the electric guitar takes up space – something traditionally associated with masculine performance.

But the paradox about the gendering of “the axe” is that a leading, stylistic founder was a woman – and many follow in her footsteps today.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

The guitar has been an important instrument of music making for centuries, but the 1930s marked the invention of the electric guitar.

Amplifying the guitar produced its distinctive feature: the capacity for sustain. This enabled sounds to siren out, dive and waver – often at high volume.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe emerged alongside the electrification of the guitar.

Her style developed over four decades from the 1930s to 1960s with fluid fretboard prowess and a percussive right hand, leaning into the hover of distortion. Tharpe influenced big names of contemporary music such as Chuck Berry, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards.

Audiences loved her.

However, a woman (also queer, and a person of colour) “owning” the electric guitar challenged the patriarchal music industry who tended to frame her as a singer, rather than a prolific instrumentalist.

DIY learning systems

While stereotypes such as “masculine” taking up space might help to explain a lack of women and gender diverse electric guitarists (and indeed other instrumentalists in rock tropes), their absence also stems from the way that skills are developed and subsequently valued.

In rock and punk music, learning to play often comes via friendship groups where knowledge is passed around and learnt using do-it-yourself (DIY) methods.

These processes are often associated with rites of passage into adulthood.

But these social networks are also gendered. Women and gender diverse people are often excluded from informal channels that create opportunities, or relegated to support roles, a reflection of mainstream ideas that set “women’s roles” to passive. This starts from a young age.

My research (to be published) shows that, for those who do pick up a guitar, DIY (and punk sentiment) is an effective tool to circumvent social barriers to skill acquisition.

Yet women and gender diverse guitarists are constantly compared to a male cannon of music history, scrutinised as an exception, but rarely exceptional.

Gendered divisions of labour that see women carry a greater weight of unpaid labour further impact the time available to hone a craft. These are the double gates of sexism and ageism that make becoming a music legend a masculine, middle aged, luxury.

Despite this, a treasure trove of musical elders have distorted the way that guitar playing is historically and sentimentally wedded to masculine expertise.

The axe in different hands

When Joan Jett burst onto the punk scene in the 1970s with her low-slung electric guitar, she had the look and attitude of her male counterparts. But she carved a style centred on solid, rhythmic blocks, saturating accents with power chords in lieu of complex, single note techniques.

Later, Kurt Cobain adopted a similar technique, perhaps explaining Jett’s appearance in Nirvana’s recent 30th album anniversary special.

In subcultural spaces, artists like Ronnie Yoshiko Fujiyama from Japanese cult band the 5, 6, 7, 8s, now in her mid 70s, shape-shifts her way through a range of genre bending musical statements that challenge stereotypical guitar playing with signature guitar pedals, and joyous virtuosity.

On her recent album tour, Kim Gordon, one of the most recognisable women in punk, now also in her 70s, ditched her bass for the electric guitar.

She ended her shows standing on her amp holding her guitar overhead. She’s doing what she’s always done: querying the boundaries of culture tropes, cementing her iconic status.

These artists and countless others challenge expectations of gender via the symbolism projected through the electric guitar.

And they go a step further in rejecting pressures for older women to be sidelined.

The Australian soundscape

Australian music culture has a rich and diverse heritage. However, the same touchstones tend to be used to produce a particular narrative about musical connoisseurship that enables (mostly) men to be elevated through to legendary status.

It’s annoying. Because in the context of rock guitar playing, the local talent pool is extensive. Current stars Courtney Barnett, Erica Dunn, and emerging musicians like Jaybird Bryne represent a legacy to the work of artists such as Suze DeMarchi, Orianthi, Adalita, Barb Waters and Sarah McLeod, all sharing commercial success as guitarists.

They sit alongside well-established independent artists really stretching the sonic parameters of the electric guitar in DIY/punk traditions including Penny Ikinger, Lisa Mackinney, Sarah Hardiman, Claire Birchall, Bonnie Mercer and Sarah Blaby.

Moving past the musical bias of the great, white, male not only expands our sonic palettes – it might also help us to rethink the limitations of binary gender roles more broadly. This means querying cultural inheritances like the axe, re-imagining who an elder might be, and embracing what they sound like.

Janelle K Johnstone receives funding from Creative Victoria and the Australia Council.