These 25 songs cover an amazing hundred years of American history and reflect the struggles, loves, laughs, tragedies, trials and, on occasion, prejudices of a huge number of Americans. Over the years, these tunes have been the inspiration behind much of the contemporary popular music in advertising, film, folk song, blues, jazz and rock. The guitar was a popular instrument in the nineteenth century and was played across America with many forms of popular music. Its comparative rugged simplicity meant it could be carried on a mule, a horse or a wagon, accompanying prospectors, cowboys, gamblers, soldiers and many others. Until the arrival of the mechanical player-pianos and piano rolls in the 1890s, and for long after that in most situations, all music had been live. Whenever a group of people gathered of an evening to put their feet up, along a cattle trail, in a mining camp or frontier saloon - there was a guitar. When I was learning the guitar there was a great shortage of easy guitar arrangements of popular tunes and, whilst not for the beginner, it is hoped that this collection of guitar solos can be played, after a little practice, by guitarists with a reasonable level of skill. The songs have endured, not because of their greatness but because of their popularity with those masses of working people who sung and heard them. Perhaps, to paraphrase Carl Sandburg, a great collector of American songs, they should be ..".overheard, rather than heard."