Dave Wirth
The American guitar style has it's roots in the blues. As an example of something good that can come from something quite bad, the blues sprang up from our upsetting past as a nation, but it became a vital gift to the world of music. The progression of that I'll leave to the historians, but the harmonic legacy of the blues and how it relates to guitar still has deep effects on today's music. Sometimes, it even gets a face-lift too.
It's highly likely that Jack White is one of the great champions of the blues in our musical culture today. Distinctive to his sound is the pentatonic scale. It shouldn't come as a surprise that this scale has five notes (Penta: Five. Get it?). Adding the note between the fourth and fifth scale degrees, a flat five in music-nerd speak, makes the pentatonic scale into a blues scale. The blues scale, finally, is directly descended from the early blues masters (The men and women who were entangled in the horrific history of our nation). The flip side is that they sparked quite a bit of music by simply being who they were and singing what they knew.
This history is rich, but in this day and age, when the spread of music is so fast that it's scary, the blues sound can sometimes be so ubiquitous as to be, well, a little bit overdone. Listening to a guitar solo in the present day, it's hard not to hear that distinctive sound. There are some who are annoyed with how pervasive the blues sound can be, and with good reason. Sounds that have that much history must be freshened up from time to time. Whether it's Jack White or The Black Key's perhaps, it's up to those who are the most fascinated with this tradition to loosen up the constrictions and give it a face lift. We listeners will listen, too. It's our culture. It's in our bones.
