History of the flamenco guitar: from the vihuela to Paco de Lucía

Background: from the vihuela to the Spanish baroque guitar

The flamenco guitar wasn’t born out of nowhere and has no single inventor: it’s the result of an instrumental evolution that goes back well before flamenco existed as we know it today. Its most distant ancestors must be sought in the vihuela de mano, the most prestigious plucked-string instrument in Renaissance Spain, with six courses of double strings and a refined repertoire associated with the noble courts. The vihuela coexisted for much of the 16th century with the four-course guitar, a more popular instrument of simpler construction, associated with a less academic, more street-level use.

Over time, well into the 17th century, the guitar gained ground on the vihuela until it almost completely displaced it, and settled into a five-course model known as the Spanish baroque guitar. This instrument, which spread across Europe partly thanks to Spanish theorists like Gaspar Sanz, was played both in strummed form, striking the whole set of strings to the rhythm of popular dances, and in plucked form, in a more melodic style inherited from the vihuela tradition. That dual nature — rhythmic strumming and melodic plucking coexisting in the same instrument — is exactly the technical seed that the flamenco guitar would inherit centuries later.

The guitar as we understand it today, with six single strings instead of double courses, became established in the 18th century and was refined throughout the 19th by builders such as Antonio de Torres, a luthier from Almería based in Seville considered the father of the modern Spanish guitar. Torres established, around the mid-19th century, box proportions, internal soundboard bracing and string length that became the reference standard for both the classical guitar and, with later constructive variants, the flamenco guitar. Without this already-established instrument, with its sound and its internal logic, the figure of the flamenco guitarist as we know it could never have come to exist.

A humble accompaniment in 19th-century flamenco

When flamenco starts taking recognisable shape in 19th-century Andalusia, the guitar occupies a clearly secondary role. The absolute centre of artistic expression is the cante: the voice of the cantaor or cantaora is what conveys the emotion, tells the story and sets the meaning of the palo being performed, while the guitar limits itself to holding the compás, marking chord changes and offering small embellishments between verses of cante, with barely any prominence of its own. In fact, the oldest and most purely regarded cantes — the toná, the primitive seguiriya, the martinete — are traditionally sung a palo seco, that is, with no instrumental accompaniment at all, which gives an idea of just how much the guitar was a later addition rather than a founding element of cante jondo.

This subordinate relationship persists, though increasingly nuanced, during the era of the cafés cantantes, those nightlife venues that proliferated across Andalusia from roughly 1860 onward and turned flamenco into a paid spectacle for the first time in its history. It was precisely in this context that the guitarist’s craft began to professionalise as a distinct, specialised figure separate from the cantaor, with names that started to be recognised for their personal way of accompanying. Guitarists like Paco el Barbero, Paco de Lucena or Javier Molina already stood out in this era for an accompaniment quality that was starting to go beyond simple rhythmic function, although the guitar’s role was still understood above all as a service to the cante, never as the star of the show.

Ramón Montoya and the birth of solo playing

The true turning point in the history of the flamenco guitar comes with Ramón Montoya (Madrid, 1879-1949), considered by near-unanimous consensus among historians and guitarists to be the father of the modern flamenco guitar. Montoya, of Madrid-born Roma descent, trained by accompanying some of the great singers of the Ópera Flamenca era, among them Antonio Chacón, one of the most influential cantaores of his generation, with whom he collaborated regularly for years.

Montoya’s decisive contribution wasn’t just his quality as an accompanist, but being the first guitarist to conceive and record falsetas — those melodic phrases of some length, more elaborate than a simple embellishment, inserted between verses of cante or presented as an introduction to a palo — already conceived with a compositional logic of their own, not as mere filler. Montoya also brought in technical and harmonic resources taken from classical guitar, in which he had also trained, expanding the sonic vocabulary of an instrument that until then had moved within much more limited territory. Thanks in large part to these recordings, made over the first decades of the 20th century, the flamenco guitar began exploring, for the first time, its potential as an instrument capable of sustaining interest on its own, without needing a voice singing above it. Montoya never became a soloist in the modern sense of giving entire solo guitar recitals — that would come later — but he laid the technical and conceptual groundwork without which that later step would not have been possible.

The middle generation: Sabicas and Niño Ricardo

Between Montoya’s legacy and Paco de Lucía’s revolution sits a generation of guitarists that proved decisive in consolidating the flamenco guitar as a discipline with its own identity, with two names usually cited above the rest: Sabicas and Niño Ricardo.

Agustín Castellón Campos, “Sabicas” (Pamplona, 1912-1990), built much of his career outside Spain, settled in New York from the late 1930s after the Civil War. This biographical circumstance had an important artistic consequence: removed from the strictly peninsular flamenco circuit, Sabicas focused on exploiting the flamenco guitar’s potential as a concert instrument, recording solo guitar albums aimed at an international audience and taking the instrument’s technique to a level of virtuosity and cleanliness that became an essential reference for every guitarist who came after, Paco de Lucía included, who publicly acknowledged his admiration for him.

Manuel Serrapí Sánchez, “Niño Ricardo” (Seville, 1904-1972), represents, by contrast, the path of someone who never strayed from accompanying cante as the core of his work, and precisely because of that his influence on playing style within Spain was enormous: he’s considered the creator of a style of falsetas and a phrasing so distinctive that a large part of Seville and Andalusian guitarists of the following generations trained, directly or indirectly, by listening to and studying his playing. Among his disciples and stylistic followers, in fact, was a very young Paco de Lucía in his early training years. Sabicas and Niño Ricardo thus represent two complementary paths of the same era: internationally-projected solo playing and the refinement of traditional accompaniment, both essential to understanding the leap that would come afterward.

Paco de Lucía’s revolution

If Ramón Montoya opened the door to solo playing, it was Francisco Sánchez Gómez, “Paco de Lucía” (Algeciras, 1947 - Mexico, 2014), who walked through it completely and changed forever what was understood as flamenco guitar. Trained from childhood in traditional accompaniment, Paco de Lucía revealed already in his first solo albums, in the 1970s, a technique of unprecedented precision and speed for the instrument, with pieces like “Entre dos aguas” (1973) that also achieved a popular success previously unheard of for an instrumental piece rooted in flamenco.

Alongside his solo career, Paco de Lucía led, together with the singer Camarón de la Isla, one of the most influential collaborations in the entire history of flamenco: between 1969 and 1977 the duo recorded nine albums that completely renewed the language of cante accompaniment, combining the utmost respect for traditional palos with a harmonic freedom that no guitarist had dared to explore so naturally until then.

But Paco de Lucía’s most disruptive contribution came with the radical expansion of the flamenco guitar’s own harmonic and instrumental language: he incorporated chords and progressions taken from jazz, introduced the Peruvian cajón to flamenco in 1977 after encountering it on a tour of Peru, formed a sextet with Brazilian music influences, and worked with musicians like bassist Carles Benavent, all without ever abandoning the jondo root of the playing. His collaborations with jazz guitarists such as John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola, in albums and joint tours in the late seventies and early eighties, finally projected the flamenco guitar internationally as a concert instrument on a par with any other virtuosic tradition in the world. When Paco de Lucía passed away in 2014, he left behind a technical and harmonic vocabulary so vast that it’s impossible to understand any flamenco guitarist who emerged afterward without, in one way or another, starting from his legacy.

The flamenco guitar today: Vicente Amigo, Tomatito and the new generation

The path opened by Paco de Lucía gave rise to a generation of guitarists who, without abandoning traditional roots, expanded the crossovers with other musical languages even further. Vicente Amigo (Guadalcanal, 1967) developed a personal style of great melodic and harmonic richness, with albums like “Poeta” (1997) that earned him international awards and recognition as one of the most personal voices in contemporary flamenco guitar. José Fernández Torres, “Tomatito” (Almería, 1958), forged over years as Camarón de la Isla’s regular accompanist after the singer’s period with Paco de Lucía, also built a solo career with major international reach, including collaborations with jazz musicians like Michel Camilo.

Alongside them lives today a new generation of guitarists — in many cases trained already in conservatories and specialised schools, something unthinkable in Montoya’s or Niño Ricardo’s time — who continue exploring the limits of the instrument in directions as varied as flamenco-jazz, chamber music with flamenco roots or fusion with music from other traditions. This coexistence between the most orthodox accompaniment to cante and the most ambitious solo exploration shows that the flamenco guitar’s original tension — between serving the voice and speaking for itself — remains, more than a century after Ramón Montoya, the central creative engine of the whole instrument.