Kevin Harding, now an adjunct professor for the music department at the University of Richmond, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Randolph-Macon College, has known his calling ever since he was a young child, when he saw a TV program featuring Chet Atkins and his legendary talent playing the guitar. “I remember being in my room at bedtime strumming an imaginary guitar,” he says, and soon after he started dedicating most of his free time learning how to play.
Later on, he’d earn a Master’s in Guitar Performance from VCU, and has performed countless styles of music all across the globe. While he’s dabbled in styles such as Samba and the West-African kora, he’s particularly well-versed in Brazilian music. He founded the Brazilian combo Quatro na Bossa in Richmond, VA in 2003, and leads the Brazilian combo at UR. I got the chance to sit down with him and discuss his career, in addition to his take on the electric guitar’s history in American popular music.
Kevin Harding became inspired to begin learning how to play the guitar because of his experience watching Chet Atkins on TV. Atkins is just one of many guitar heroes over the years that have inspired generations to learn how to play, including Chuck Berry, Jimmy Page, Slash, and Jimi Hendrix just to name a few. In class, we discussed the importance that jazz’s biggest stars had in the genre’s push into the mainstream. When figures like Louis Armstrong died, it left a massive void at the top of genre which it wasn’t equipped to fill.
Like later in jazz’s history, musicians have begun to emulate the work of the guitar giants like Berry and Atkins, instead of developing their own signature style. Jimi Hendrix, Harding said, is a key example of a guitarist formulating his own style. “It’s also not easy to come up with new ideas today, which [guitar greats] like Jimi Hendrix and Keith Richards were famous for.” Thus, there is a lack of such figures in popular music today, meaning that less future guitarists will be inspired, meaning less popularity.
It’s easy, then, the see the parallels of jazz’s decline and the guitar’s (albeit much slower) decline. Harding also suggests that the lack in guitar superstars could also be influenced by the way people listen to music today. “[Guitarists] simply don’t resonate with the public like they used to. Back in the day, everyone listened to the same stuff, because there simply weren’t many options. All you had was the radio. Today, everyone goes to their little corner, to what makes them feel comfortable.” His argument seems to suggest that it’s impossible for a guitarist to have the same impact in today’s landscape, because there is simply so much more variety in what people listen to; there aren’t as many universally loved musicians. “I’ll ask my students about which guitarists they listen to, and I’ll simply get blank stares,” says Harding.