A four part documentary series starts this Sunday looking at the story of the guitar. Such is its domination of the soundtrack of our lives that it’s almost impossible today to imagine a world without the guitar, writes Tony Matthews. But it wasn’t always so. Back in the early Fifties popular music was ruled by crooners like Perry Como and the Beverley Sisters, the big bands and jazz; it was cosy and respectable and the guitar simply did not figure.

“Before Bill Haley and Elvis, there was a sort of vacuum in which the guitar didn’t have a great deal of value,” explains Alan Yentob, who approaches his three-part Story Of The Guitar for BBC One’s arts strand Imagine as a kind of intrigued outsider, whose own background is grounded in a Middle Eastern tradition of ouds and tablas, rather than Gibsons, Fenders and Rickenbackers. Yentob’s aim is to discover how, in little more than 50 years, the guitar has risen from being the instrument of outsiders to the most popular in the world.

So where did this iconic symbol of sexual and social rebellion come from? “That’s the mystery,” he says. “In some ways the guitar comes from everywhere. There are different manifestations of instruments with strings in many cultures, but no one clear line of development. You can see its origins in the Arabian oud; in the lyre of Greek mythology; and in medieval instruments like the gittern and the sittern, or the lute.”

In tracing the guitar’s evolution, Yentob finds its forerunners were often street instruments, popular with the common people but considered inferior musically and socially to more classical instruments. In Elizabethan and Stuart times, guitar-like sitterns or gitterns became fashionable props to be seen in competition with the lute, a notoriously tricky instrument to play and keep in tune. Such instruments were often identified with sex and sittern became a slang term for ladies of easy virtue – “any man can play upon them”.

“The guitar has always had that potential,” says Yentob. “You only have to look at the shape of it to see what a sexual object it is. Being a way to impress girls is a theme that can be traced back to the Spanish traditions of Flamenco through to cowboys like Gene Autry in the Fifties, strumming guitars to the delight of whoever.”

It wasn’t until the 20th century that classical guitarist Andres Segovia finally gave the instrument a status and repertoire it had previously lacked, developing his own style as a performer away from the clicking heels and flamboyance of Flamenco. “He turned it into something more serious and skilful, something that you could listen to on its own,” says Yentob.

The big problem for Segovia and for another guitar genius, jazz player Django Reinhardt, was the relative inaudibility of their instruments when playing in larger venues or in a band. In America, the Martin company developed bigger guitars called “Dreadnoughts” to produce more sound, but big band leader Benny Goodman still regarded guitars with disdain, at least until Charlie Christian attached a pickup and amplifier to his guitar, becoming a force to be reckoned with in the Benny Goodman Sextet – the first band to build its repertoire around guitar riffs.

The second programme continues the story of the evolution of the electric guitar from early experiments such as Rickenbacker’s “Frying Pan”; to its eventual transformation into the solid-body instrument that would become the central plank of rock ‘n’ roll. “I don’t know how many people know that the most popular guitar style in America in the Twenties and Thirties was the Hawaiian guitar,” says Yentob. “But it’s through that and the evolution of the steel guitar that people came to see that there was a sound that would resonate more.”

The series starts on Sunday 5th October 2008 (22:40) on BBC 1

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