John Hammond on Charlie Christian.

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John Hammond on the record business.

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John Hammond discusses multi-track recording.

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Q: “We seem to think really I guess in the overview, without looking at details, that Charlie Christian sort of invented the electric guitar. Not so! There were other people playing it before him…”

A: “Well, I had another electric guitar player the year before in the ’38 spirituals swing concert I had, Leonard Weir was very good. He played the four-string guitar, though, not a Spanish guitar, but it was amplified. He was excellent, but something was wrong with the turntable in the first concert. So it was recorded, but we could never ... I guess, we could have straightened the thing out, you know, with the 33 and a third safeties were lost on that concert. I had to rely on the 78th, which had the wow on it. And I supposed we could have probably compensated for wow electronically somehow, but we didn't know how to do it in the 50s, so I just used the things with Johnny Christian, which was better anyway.”