From Honolulu to Nashville: The Hawaiian Roots of Steel Guitar
Broadcast Date: 12/10/13
Hosted by Rob Dunn
(Click the above title for the accompanying YouTube playlist)
Open Bed: You’re For Me - Buck Owens, 1962

RD: Hello everybody and welcome to Rob’s Americana Radio Hour!    Behind me you can hear one of the all-time greats of country music—Mr. Buck Owens—singing the tune “You’re For Me” from 1962.  We’ll go ahead and give it a listen (Play out rest of song)

RD: Featured on the steel guitar is Ralph Mooney, one of the most instrumental musicians to the “Bakersfield Sound” and country music in general.  He was the first steel guitar player for Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Wynn Stewart, and helped “craft Waylon [Jenning]’s sound” (Franklin).  As you can tell, the steel guitar has been absolutely instrumental in shaping country music as we know it.  I was curious as to how this came about.  For this week’s program I’ll share with you the surprising story of the steel guitar.

Now close your eyes, and think of Hawaii.  What do you see?  If you’re like most, you probably thought of a hula girl in a grass skirt playing ukulele, maybe at a luau, with a pig roasting over the fire.  Now what do you hear?  Maybe waves crashing off in the distance, a band on stage.  

Fade in - Instrumental: Hawaiian Pussycat - Spongebob Squarepants Production Band

A ukulele player strumming away, maybe a drummer, somebody on the vibes.   What’s that other sound? (Play out rest of song)

RD: You just heard “Hawaiian Pussycat” by the Spongebob Squarepants Production Band.  You might recognize it as the theme song for Spongebob’s pet snail, Gary.  All jokes aside, that is a great example of a music that is unmistakably Hawaiian.  And its defining characteristic—that part of it that makes it Hawaiian—is that steel guitar sound you heard.

The guitar itself was introduced to Hawaii sometime in the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century probably by “Mexicans or Californians” (Kanahele 351).  Up until the 1860s, when the guitar was first reaching a wide audience in Honolulu, the guitar had been what is now called “Spanish Classical Guitar,” and the strings had been “gut strings” or strings made from the intestines of certain animals, such as goats and sheep.  In the mid-1860s, the Portuguese traders introduced the steel string to the Hawaiians, which had a much harsher sound (Kanahele 352).  This distinct sound would be fundamental to the Hawaiian style of playing that emerged called “Slack Key Guitar” playing.  Slack Key guitar is distinctive in its use of open tunings, plucking rather than strumming the strings, and its repetitive yet improvisatory style.  I have here with me a tune from one of the greats of Slack Key Guitar, Ledward Kaapana.  Let’s give it a listen; here’s Led doing “Nani.”

Music Break: Nani - Ledward Kaapana, 2013
RD: Legend has it that an eleven year old guitar player named Joseph Kekuku was walking along the railroad tracks in Hawaii playing his guitar in 1885, when he “picked up a bolt [and] slid it across the strings” (Kanahele 367).  This would the “big bang” in steel guitar.  

Fade In - Instrumental: Killing the Blues - Ed Gerhard

He immediately tried the technique with other objects such as combs, penknives, straight razors, and tumblers.  About five years later, in a machine shop class, Kekuku developed at “cylinder of steel, about four inches long, which was convenient to hold in his left hand and noiseless as it slid along the strings” (Kanahele 368).  This cylinder of steel would become what gives “steel guitar” its name.  It is not the steel strings nor—as we will see later—the material the guitar itself is made out of that gives the “steel guitar” its name.  Because of so many components of a guitar that are made out of steel, it can be confusing to keep it all straight.  It is sometimes called the “Hawaiian guitar,” but to Hawaiians, the “Hawaiian guitar” refers to the slack-key style, furthering confusions about the distinctions (“Steel Guitar” June 24, 2013).

Besides the “invention” of the steel cylinder used to play the steel guitar, two other important contributions were made by the Hawaiians.  To achieve “a bite” while picking the guitar, the early Hawaiian steel players needed something beyond the usual use of fingers and fingernails present in Spanish classical guitar playing style.  To do this they formed small “finger and thumb picks cut out of metal and shaped to fit their fingers” (Kanahele 370).  These metal fingerpicks were also used in the slack key guitar style, but the history of which group “invented” the guitar fingerpicks is murky.  

Also, to eliminate fret buzz—or when the steel string or steel bar vibrates against the fret of the guitar—the Hawaiians introduced the “adapter.”  This adapter would basically be a modified nut (for those of you that don’t know what a nut is, it is a piece—usually made from bone, or wood that is placed in between the tuning pegs of the headstock and the fretboard of the guitar).  The adapter wood raise the strings away from the fretboard of the guitar and keep the sound fluid and free from unwanted noise.  The bridge (or where the string attaches to the body of the guitar) would also have needed to be modified.  Like the early slides and fingerpicks, the early adapters were handmade.

These three developments—the slide, the fingerpicks, and the adapter—all contributed greatly to the distinct sound created by the early Hawaiian guitar players.  It would not be until the 1940s by the time a Hawaiian contributed another breakthrough to steel guitar playing—the pedal steel.

Fade in - Instrumental: India’s National Song (Vandhe Mataram) - Mr. S Narayana Iyengar

Another interesting theory on the origins of the steel guitar comes from a man named Charles E. King.  According to him, a man named Gabriel Davion created the steel guitar.  Davion was born in India, “kidnapped by a sea-captain and finally brought to Honolulu” (Kanahele 367).  Davion had a “new way of playing the guitar,” which might have come from the Indian instrument gottuvadyam.  The gottuvadyam—as you can hear in the background—is an eight-stringed instrument which literally means “the small slide rod instrument” (Kanahele 97).  This instrument has ancient origins, probably coming to the Indian subcontinent around the 3rd century.  There is little evidence on whether Davion is a definitive link, but, if true, would be a fascinating look at cross cultural influences: a Indian type of playing formed on Spanish guitars, played on Portuguese steel strings, by a people who bring their distinct flavor to a new form of guitar playing that would change the world.  In the case of VM Bhatt and the Hindustani Slide world, it would be a homecoming of sorts.

Music Break - Instrumental: Many Miles From Home - Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Jerry Douglas, and Edgar Meyer
RD: You just heard from VM Bhatt, Jerry Douglas, and Edgar Meyer doing the tune “Many Miles From Home” from their 1996 release Bourbon & Rosewater.  Molded after Bhatt’s 1994 Grammy-winning endeavor with Ry Cooder, A Meeting By The River, this album furthers the notions of bluegrass-classical, east-west, and beyond.  Bhatt—a Hindustani man—grew up in India.  Interestingly, India had been enthralled with the Hawaiian steel guitar since the 1920s when a Hawaiian man named Tau Moe moved to Calcutta and began selling instruments (Ellis).  Soon, the Hawaiian steel guitar sounds became a common sound in Indian popular music, and especially in the movie soundtracks of the emerging Bollywood film industry.  It also influenced the classical music of India, as first seen with  Brij Bhushan Kabra playing a modified Gibson 400 lap steel guitar with the legendary Ali Akbar Khan.  VM Bhatt is deeply within this line of classical music, studying for many years with the great Ravi Shankar.  In fact, Bhatt tinkered with a guitar his sister brought him from Germany, and invented a distinctly Indian type of guitar, called a Mohan Veena, which features twenty strings, some of which are played with the slide and others that—like the sitar—vibrate with the instrument.  This type of guitar has become the “de facto standard for playing [Indian Classical] ragas on the guitar” (Ellis).  

Fade in - Instrumental: The St. Louis Blues - Frank Ferera and John Paaluhi, 1925 (Actually released by Edison Records, not Columbia)

Like the Hawaiian guitar craze in India, a similar craze enthralled many other parts of the world.  The first place to be swept up in the craze—even before India—was the American mainland.  In 1899 July Paka or Tom Hennessey played for Edison, soon other luminaries followed suit and came over to the mainland, such as Joseph Kekuku in 1905 (Kanahele 375-376).  This was of course during the first days of widely available sound records pioneered by Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1887.  Because of the widespread popularization of this medium, some Hawaiian steel guitar players were able to record their music and circulate across the country and across the globe.  The same phenomenon was seen as Hawaiian steel guitar players played in many movies.

Another way the Hawaiian style of playing spread through the U.S. was the travelling Hawaiian orchestras as well as the individual players—such as Sol Hoopii—touring on their own.  These players ventured into the “vaudeville, chautauquas, clubs and theaters, [and] expositions” that stretched across the U.S. and Canada (Kanahele 376).  Many of the tours took place in the Western United States, in places such as California, Washington, Utah, and Oklahoma and featured many facets of Hawaiian dance, music, and culture.  For many small-town Americans, this was the way they were introduced to Hawaiian music.  For Bob Dunn—no relation to myself—his introduction to Hawaiian guitar in Oklahoma in 1917 would be the beginning of a revolution in the genre of “western swing” (Kanahele 372).

Fade In - Instrumental: Oh Susanna - Cindy Cashdollar, 2010

With the increasing popularity of Hawaiian steel guitar playing, the next big breakthrough was the invention of the “resonator guitar” in the early 1920s.  This pre-electric guitar development allowed for the guitar to be heard—to an extent—within a full band or a larger performing space.  Although many different types of the guitar exist, the two most prominent are the “dobro” and the “National” guitar.  The dobro was picked up in early country music and eventually bluegrass music as it emerged in the mid-1940s.  Jerry Douglas, who we heard from with VM Bhatt, holds the mantle as world’s leading dobro player. The National guitar—for a visual refer to the Dire Straits’ album cover for Brother In Arms—with its shiny metal body figured into many Delta blues players’ styles.  Son House and Bukka White both used the National guitar for their slide playing, which although has a foot deep within the West African “diddley bow” tradition, also was influenced heavily by the Hawaiian steel guitar records of the 1920s.  Both types of resonator guitars “won immediate popularity with Hawaiian steel guitarists” (Kanahele 370).

Fade In - Instrumental: Steel Guitar Rag - Junior Brown

Bob Dunn—steel guitar player for Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies—was looking for a something that could be heard through the “horns, reeds, drums, multiple fiddles, and background noise” of the band (Kanahele 372).  In 1935, he attached a pickup to a Martin guitar, and plugged in to a Vol-U-Tone amplifier.  Around the same time, Rickenbacker developed their “frying pan” guitar, which was the first mass-produced electric guitar.  Soon, prettier “electric lap steels” were mass-produced and marketed, and Bob Dunn’s jazzy style of steel playing spread all across the western swing genre.

Musical Break: Stay A Little Longer - Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys
RD: You just heard from Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys doing the tune “Stay A Little Longer” from the 1940s.  Around this same time was when the next big development happened in steel guitar: the pedal steel.

Musical Break: Teach Your Children - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (with Jerry Garcia on Pedal Steel) - 1970
RD: You just heard Jerry Garcia playing the steel on Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s classic “Teach Your Children.”  The exact history of pedal steel is not clear, but we do know that it follows Bill C. Malone’s observation that “most of the innovative developments in steel guitar style came from west of the Mississippi River” (Haslam 23).  In fact, one of the first people to develop the pedal steel was a Hawaii-born musician named Ernest Tavares (Kanahele 374).  Later, the design was modified by Gibson to become the “Electraharp.”  The pedal steel added upon the basic electric steel by having multiple necks, pedals, and levers to help manipulate the sound.  Soon, this twangy contraption came to define what country music was.  It supplanted the fiddle as the instrument that “can turn virtually any performance into country” (Haslam 22).  Because of this, the pedal steel was instrumental to shaping the sound of country-rock that emerged from California in the late 1960s, thanks in huge part to “back-to-roots” sound of The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, an album that has Gram Parsons’ distinct stamp upon it.  Here’s a Gram Parson tune from his debut solo album GP.

Music Break: Streets of Baltimore - Gram Parsons, 1973
RD: Steel guitar has also had a definite impact on the way “regular” guitar is played.  The obsession with pedal steel tone led to the creation of the “B-Bender” guitar by fellow Byrds member Clarence White and Gene Parsons.  This invention took a regular Fender Telecaster and gave it the ability to recreate that unmistakable pedal steel sound.

In terms of playing itself, one of the men who has truly revolutionized the way the guitar has played—Mr. Jeff Beck—incorporated many different aspects of the steel guitar into his playing.  The extensive manipulation of his volume knob as well as the way he uses vibrato mimics much of the steel guitar sound.  Here he is playing the Santo and Johnny classic, “Sleepwalk,” in a tribute show he did for Les Paul back in 2011.

Music Break - Instrumental: Sleepwalk - Jeff Beck, 2011
RD: The pedal steel lives on in music of popular music today.  The first, Ashley Monroe’s “Weed Instead of Roses,” is treading a fine line between modern and classic country.  The pedal steel is there, but it is definitely not at the forefront of the sound.  This is a big change from the “golden years” of country music, when pedal steel dominated.  At least Monroe includes pedal steel in many of her songs, many of today’s country artists—such as Taylor Swift and Luke Bryan—don’t even have pedal steel in their sound.  As Tom Petty said, modern country music is like “rock in the middle Eighties where it became incredibly generic” (Rolling Stone 2013). Thankfully, Monroe still has a foot planted in classic country music, with (all the right) modern improvements.

Also in this next set is Maggie Björklund, a pedal steel guitar player from Denmark.  She recently got done touring with Jack White in support of his album Blunderbuss.  Her music pushes boundaries on what can be done with steel guitar.

Music Break: Weed Instead of Roses - Ashley Monroe, 2013

Summer Romance - Maggie Björklund, 2011

RD: In the spirit of the holiday season I’d like to finish out today’s show by playing a Hawaiian Christmas song.  No, not Bing Crosby’s “Mele Kalikimaka.”  Scared you for a minute there huh?  I’ll be playing the other Hawaiian song, “Christmas Island.”  I couldn’t find Bob Dylan’s awesome version from 2009’s Christmas in the Heart, but I did find Leon Redbone doing his take on the 1946 classic.


End Bed: Christmas Island - Leon Redbone, 1987
RD: It’s been my pleasure to tell you all about the history of the steel guitar.  I hope you enjoyed listening as much as I did putting this together.  Until we meet again, this is Rob Dunn signing off.  Mele Kalikimaka! (Play out rest of song)

Works Cited

Ellis, Andy. Premier Guitar, "The Secret World of Hindustani Slide." Last modified June 08, 2012. Accessed December 9, 2013. http://www.premierguitar.com/articles/The_Secret_World_of_Hindustani_Slide.

Franklin, Paul. July 30, 2013. December 8, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9adGC2Cihbo.

Haslam, Gerald W. Workin' Man Blues. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.

Kanahele, George S., ed. Hawaiian Music and Musicians. Honlulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1979. s.v. "Steel Guitar."

Petty, Tom. "Q&A: Tom Petty Finishing LP 'Unlike Anything We've Ever Done' Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/q-a-tom-petty-finishing-lp-unlike-anything-weve-ever-done-20130805

Wikipedia, "Steel Guitar." Last modified June 24, 2013. Accessed December 10, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_guitar.






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