They can be acoustic, electric or both and they can come in the form of flat top or archtop wood-bodied, metal-bodied resonator, or solid-bodied instruments.

From 1927 onwards, the very first true wood-bodied acoustic tenor guitars appeared as production instruments made by both Gibson and Martin.

Budget tenor guitars by makers such as Harmony, Regal and Stella, were produced in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s.

National, formed by the Dopyera Brothers, also made significant numbers of resonator tenor and plectrum guitars between the 1920s and 1940s.

In the mid-1950s electric solid-body tenor guitar models began to appear from companies such as Gibson, Gretsch, Guild, and Epiphone.

The Delmore Brothers were a very influential pioneering country music duo from the early 1930s to the late 1940s that featured the tenor guitar.

Rabon favored the Martin 0-18T tenor guitar and the Louvin Brothers later recorded a tribute album to the Delmores that featured Rabon's Martin 0-18T tenor played by mandolinist Ira Louvin, but tuned as the four treble guitar strings.

Another 1930s band that featured the tenor guitar was the Hoosier Hotshots, commonly considered the creators of mid-western rural jazz.

Selmer heavily promoted the guitar through Melody Maker and Eddie Freeman even wrote a special tune for it called "In All Sincerity".

At this time, they were made by makers such as Epiphone, Gibson, Guild, and Gretsch as archtop acoustics and electrics, as well as a range of flat top models by Martin.

A Martin 0-18T flattop acoustic tenor guitar was played in the late 1950s by Nick Reynolds of The Kingston Trio.

Contemporary players of the tenor guitar include Neko Case, Josh Rouse, Joel Plaskett, Adam Gnade,[4] Ani DiFranco, Carrie Rodriguez, Joe Craven, and Dhani Harrison.