In a lively narrative, filled with historical anecdote and the texts of songs and ballads, Frederic Grunfeld traces the guitar's evolution through the ages, in the hands of the people who played it: stone-age hunters who twanged the forerunner of all stringed instruments, the mouth bow; Hittites, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; the Moorish minstrels of Spain and the medieval troubadours; sixteenth-century Spanish court composers; rococo French voluptuaries;...