Historians have repeatedly looked to popular music as a window into Americanculture, especially of the 1950s and 1960s. Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan have allbeen canonized as icons whose music reflected pivotal shifts in youth culture. Yet recentscholarship has complicated standard narratives of popular music history by emphasizing thewide spectrum of musical experiences that produced such acts (Wald 2009, 2015). Even so,critics and scholars continue to treat the era’s musical genres in isolation, analyzing “rock `n’roll,” “rhythm and blues,” and “jazz” as separate phenomena. As a result, the myriadconnections among them have been minimized in favor of uncluttered historical narratives.In this dissertation, I demonstrate the benefit of analyzing American musical culturenot through a specific genre, but rather an instrument: the electric bass guitar. From itsinvention in 1951 through the height of the British Invasion in the mid-1960s, the electricbass weathered substantial shifts in musical styles and audiences. In turn, the stories of themusicians who played it shed new light on the social and economic issues that defined thisera, including constructions of race and gender, the rise of middle class consumerism, and theincreasing autonomy of youth culture. The benefit of re-examining history through the lensof this particular instrument is thus twofold: first, it redresses weaknesses in the standardhistorical narrative by embracing the interconnected experiences of musicians and audiencesthat lived through this era; second, it provides a new window into American culture itself.