How does a new instrument become assimilated into an existing musical culture? In The Bastard Instrument, Brian F. Wright shows that the electric bass’s current prominence was a rather unlikely outcome. Although the electric bass was louder, more durable, and easier to transport than its acoustic predecessor, most of its early adopters only begrudgingly adopted the instrument. Against the upright bass’s established identity, the merits of a solid-body electric bass were not immediately obvious. On the contrary, its boisterous sound and guitarist-friendly horizontal playing position were initially detractors for professional bassists who were already happy with their upright instruments. Thus, it is noteworthy that the electric bass, introduced in the 1950s, overcame social stigma and ridicule from professional musicians to become the default “bass” by the end of the following decade.

The Bastard Instrument chronicles the turbulent early years of the electric bass, during which it struggled to gain traction and legitimacy among professional musicians. In the vein of previous cultural histories of the synthesizer, electric guitar, and drum set, Wright highlights the stories of dozens of musicians across nearly as many scenes and geographies, showing how the electric bass’s path from “bastard instrument” to its now default position in popular music happened in fits and starts.Footnote ¹ The book is an effortless page turner, filled with engaging storytelling about a neglected instrument lurking beneath some of the biggest recordings and performances in popular music history. Wright’s agility as a writer makes this book accessible to specialist scholars, undergraduate students, and non-scholar bassists all at once. Moreover, his encyclopedic knowledge of popular music history allows the book to follow the bass in disparate and forgotten corners of popular music history without becoming cumbersome or superficial. This volume is both a significant history of popular music and an indispensable history of the bass.

Chapter one follows Leo Fender’s attempt to imitate the sound of an upright bass with his solid-body electric Precision Bass. Wright attributes Fender’s eventual, if unlikely, success to not prescribing a market for his invention from the onset, inadvertently widening the possible audience for the new instrument. Following a diverse cast of characters, including Fender’s first endorsee, Shifty Henry of The Treniers, Sonny Jay of Louis Jordan’s band, and Bob Manners from Liberace’s band, Wright effectively shows how Fender’s invention was variously received by professional bassists, who were often persuaded into using it for its practicality.

Chapter two paints an in-depth picture of Lionel Hampton’s bassist, Monk Montgomery, who became the reluctant face of the electric bass in the jazz press. His initial dismissal of the electric bass as a “bastard instrument” vividly sums up contemporary perception and lends the book its provocative title. Wright weaves a nuanced reception history of the instrument, contrasting positive reactions from the jazz press with more critical takes from contemporary jazz bassists. Despite their protestations, however, Wright argues that the electric bass’s sound fit squarely within the jazz idiom of the 1950s, meaning any negative reception it received says more about their preexisting biases than the instrument’s actual sound.

Chapter three follows a “who’s who” of bassists from the early rock ‘n’ roll era who initially adopted the electric bass as a live instrument for its practicality on the road. Through wonderfully engaging vignettes of life on tour in the 1950s, Wright argues that by presenting the instrument to audiences around America, these bassists inadvertently introduced the look and sound of the electric bass to new audiences, paving the way for its eventual acceptance. Emphasizing rock ‘n’ roll’s touring history, Wright also undertakes a methodological intervention in popular music scholarship, which has largely privileged the recording as its central object. Shifting focus towards live performance enables Wright to foreground overlooked innovations that were simultaneously occurring on the road. Subtle methodological critiques such as this are interwoven throughout the book and are a testament to Wright’s exhaustive and wide-reaching archival research.

Chapter four follows the development of new techniques by bassists for independent record labels who relied on gimmicky sounds to compete with the major labels. Wright describes several idiosyncratic styles of playing with a pick, including “click bass,” “Knackbass,” and “Tic-Tac bass.” Here, Wright’s curated companion playlist is especially helpful, and in some ways necessary, to fully appreciate the impact of the plucked bass on these records. Importantly, Wright points out that although modern-day bassists may question the authenticity of using a pick as opposed to playing with one’s fingers, it was these early pick-wielding bassists who first successfully managed to distinguish the sound of the electric bass from its upright forebearer.

Chapter five, the first in a series of standout chapters, describes the oft-forgotten world of amateur bassists who took up the instrument during the years before the British invasion. Whereas conventional historical narratives depict the period between Elvis and The Beatles as a nadir in the history of rock, Wright argues that these accounts miss out on the significant innovations occurring amongst amateur musicians at the time. Wright’s unique archive for this chapter includes a bevy of instructional resources, including method books and Play Guitar with … records that enable deeper engagement with otherwise undocumented amateur musical practices. By foregrounding the commercial reach of these instructional resources, such as the surprise hit record Play Guitar with the Ventures (1965), Wright shows that an amateur rock community was already well underway in the years before The Beatles burst onto the American scene.

Chapter six, another standout chapter, concerns the cultural politics of 1960s recording studios. It contains an impressive array of microhistories detailing some of the most prolific (though rarely attributed) session bassists of the era, including musicians from New York’s “lost” scene, which has failed to receive the same scholarly attention as the former studios. Filled with new oral histories conducted by Wright, this chapter thoughtfully touches upon complicated issues of gender, race, authorship, and labor within 1960s studio sessions, bringing to life the stories of countless musicians vital to popular music history but generally obscured by history.

Chapter seven, another standout chapter, centers on the bass playing behind the British invasion. Wright’s discussion of Paul McCartney’s bass playing is especially significant, since McCartney’s more visible talents as a singer and songwriter have vastly overshadowed his equally important (and skilled) role as bassist in The Beatles. Wright’s analysis shows that while McCartney and EMI studios’ engineers initially sought to emulate the sound of African American bassists like James Jamerson, they ended up devising new techniques for recording the instrument that contributed to a distinctive sound apart from the band’s American influences. I suspect Wright’s discussion of McCartney’s musicianship will have a lasting influence on future Beatles scholarship.

In the eighth and final chapter, Wright discusses the bass’s emergence as a lead instrument in the hands of Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Casady and Sly and the Family Stone’s Larry Graham. Closing out the book’s main chapters, these case studies compellingly show the electric bass stepping into the limelight after almost two decades of cultural obscurity. As with the thoughtful presentation of many of Wright’s case studies, the juxtaposition of these two artists reveals previously hidden connections and subtly revises prevailing histories of popular music that reproduce stylistic boundaries still segregated by race.

The book also includes six shorter interludes, which cover an impressive amount of ground, including discussions of numerous failed prototypes, as well as players from smaller local scenes in Texas, Chicago, and England. The depth of Wright’s insights persists throughout these interludes for which fewer archival sources exist. To name one noteworthy example, in a blink-and-you-miss-it passage from the first interlude on precursors to the Fender electric bass, Wright examines an archival photograph of inventor Paul Tutmarc and his bassist wife, Lorraine Tutmarc, musing that “the first bass guitarist was therefore likely a woman” (17). That such a remarkable detail, even if only a speculation, is presented with so little fanfare is a testament to the beautifully comprehensive nature of Wright’s research, which contains novel insights on almost every page.

The Bastard Instrument is a must-read for anyone interested in the electric bass, popular music history, or musical instrument studies more broadly. Readers expecting a work of “critical organology” won’t find much engagement with the discipline’s theoretical frameworks, but this is by design—in the introduction, Wright explicitly distances his project from Actor-Network Theory and other theoretical paradigms that grant agency to non-human actors. And in fact, the book is arguably less a cultural history of the bass itself than that of the players who gave the instrument its meaning. But Wright’s human-centered philosophy is the key to the book’s appeal. The stories he weaves of players navigating the instrument’s unfavorable perception, through to its eventual acceptance, paint empathetic portraits that make for a deeply engaging read and ultimately lend his study a timeless quality that should make it compulsory reading for many years to come.