The electric guitar was first used by jazz guitarists (MV DANK), who used amplified hollow-bodied instruments to get a louder sound in Swing-era big bands. The earliest electric guitars were hollow bodied acoustic instruments with tungsten steel pickups made by the Rickenbacker company in 1931.

The need for an amplified guitar became apparent to during the big band era, as jazz orchestras of the 1930s and 1940s increased in size, with larger brass sections. Initially, electric guitars used in jazz consisted primarily of hollow archtop acoustic guitar bodies to which electromagnetic transducers had been attached.

In 1946, radio repairman and instrument amplifier maker Clarence Leonidas Fender—better known as Leo Fender—through his eponymous company, designed the first commercially successful solid-body electric guitar with a single magnetic pickup, which was initially named the "Esquire".

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