Richard Dyer-Bennet (b. 1913) went to school in Germany in the late 1920s, where he learned some songs, German folk songs and other ditties, from some of his school mates. He also and learned a few chords on the guitar to accompany the songs. A few years later, when in his twenties, he sang a few of the songs at a Christmas party in the San Francisco Bay area, where a voice teacher heard him, told him he had what she considered a "minstrel's voice," and suggested that he pursue singing as a career.

Up until that time, singing was just for fun and he aspired to become a professional soccer player. But the voice teacher, Gertrude Wheeler Beckman, told him of retired Swedish minstrel Swen Scholander, whom he met a few years later—and was so impressed that he decided to become a singer, a modern day minstrel like Scholander.

(Note:   Despite the fact that folk songs comprised much of his concert repertoire, Dyer-Bennet never called himself a "folk singer." Indeed, he always said he was not, likening himself more to the professional minstrels of eld.)

The point of all this is that in the 1920s, in Germany at least, the guitar was used fairly commonly as a convenient instrument for accompanying informal singing.

Don Firth