Episode 3: The People's Instrument

If you flip through any musical instrument catalog, one fact will become blindingly clear: the guitar is by far the most popular instrument in America. But that wasn’t always the case, and I’ve often wondered: if the electric guitar hadn't gotten so popular, what would we be playing instead? To answer this question, I take a trip back in time by means of the 1903 Sears Roebuck catalog and a series of Philadelphia junk shops. In the process, I discover a type of instrument that used to be hugely popular and is now all but forgotten: the fretless zither. After finding and restoring a host of instruments I’d never seen before, including phonoharps, Marxophones, and Taishogotos, I end up building a harp of my own.

You can listen to Episode 3: The People's Instrument online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Episode 3: The People's Instrument is an episode from Sample Size: 1 by Dave Hilowitz.

This episode is 00:31:52 long.

This episode was published on Jun 1, 2016.

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