[Brian Krashpad]

A lot of plywood references there.

Actually, it's pretty rare to find a plywood guitar nowadays. They're still made to be sure, but it's much more common to find even cheap electric guitars made of multipiece bodies of some actual solid wood, typically something inexpensive like agathis or basswood. You have to be really scraping the bottom of the barrel (like especially low-rung Chinese imports, like counterfeits of Gibsons or other brands; or Fender Starcasters sold in Wal-Marts) to find plywood being used.

In contrast, consider this: in the early 80's Gibson used the infamous "pancake" bodies, which it could be argued were themselves a form of plywood, as well as using 3-piece maple caps [something they could never get away with nowadays (in facts, even Epi couldn't get away with that nowadays)]. So there is not necessarily a correlation between age and quality of construction. That being said, in general the older guitars of the 60's and prior did not use such arguably questionable methods, at least not the big major US-made brands.