The lap steel guitar, also known as a Hawaiian guitar or lap slide guitar, is a type of
steel guitar
A steel guitar () is any guitar played while moving a steel bar or similar hard object against plucked strings. The bar itself is called a "steel" and is the source of the name "steel guitar". The instrument differs from a conventional guitar i ...
without pedals that is typically played with the instrument in a horizontal position across the performer's
lap. Unlike the usual manner of playing a traditional
acoustic guitar
An acoustic guitar is a musical instrument in the string family. When a string is plucked, its vibration is transmitted from the bridge, resonating throughout the top of the guitar. It is also transmitted to the side and back of the instrument, ...
, in which the performer's fingertips press the strings against
frets
A fret is any of the thin strips of material, usually metal wire, inserted laterally at specific positions along the Neck (music), neck or Fingerboard, fretboard of a stringed instrument. Frets usually extend across the full width of the Neck ( ...
, the pitch of a steel guitar is changed by pressing a polished
steel bar against strings while plucking them with the opposite hand. The steel guitar's name is derived from this steel bar. Though the instrument does not have frets, it displays markers that resemble them. Lap steels may differ markedly from one another in external appearance, depending on whether they are
acoustic or
electric
Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter possessing an electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by Maxwel ...
, but in either case, do not have pedals, distinguishing them from
pedal steel guitars.
The steel guitar was the first foreign musical instrument to gain a foothold in American pop music. It originated in the
Hawaiian Kingdom
The Hawaiian Kingdom, also known as the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi ( Hawaiian: ɛ ɐwˈpuni həˈvɐjʔi, was an archipelagic country from 1795 to 1893, which eventually encompassed all of the inhabited Hawaiian Islands. It was established in 1795 w ...
about 1885, popularized by an
Oahu
Oahu (, , sometimes written Oahu) is the third-largest and most populated island of the Hawaiian Islands and of the U.S. state of Hawaii. The state capital, Honolulu, is on Oahu's southeast coast. The island of Oahu and the uninhabited Northwe ...
youth named
Joseph Kekuku, who became known for playing a
traditional guitar by laying it across his lap and sliding a piece of metal against the strings to change the pitch. The instrument's distinctive
portamento
In music, portamento (: ''portamenti''; from old , meaning 'carriage' or 'carrying'), also known by its French name glissade, is a pitch sliding from one Musical note, note to another. The term originated from the Italian language, Italian exp ...
sound, characterized by a smooth gliding between notes, became popular throughout the islands. American
popular culture
Popular culture (also called pop culture or mass culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of cultural practice, practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as popular art f. pop art
F is the sixth letter of the Latin alphabet.
F may also refer to:
Science and technology Mathematics
* F or f, the number 15 (number), 15 in hexadecimal and higher positional systems
* ''p'F'q'', the hypergeometric function
* F-distributi ...
or mass art, sometimes contraste ...
became fascinated with
Hawaiian music
The music of Hawaii includes an array of traditional and popular styles, ranging from native Hawaiian folk music to modern rock and hip hop. Styles like slack-key guitar are well known worldwide, while Hawaiian-tinged music is a frequent par ...
during the first half of the twentieth century – to the degree of becoming a musical
fad
A fad, trend, or craze is any form of collective behavior that develops within a culture, a generation, or social group in which a group of people enthusiastically follow an impulse for a short time period.
Fads are objects or behaviors tha ...
. Americans were curious about the lap steel instrument featured in its performance, and came to refer to it as a "Hawaiian guitar", and the horizontal playing position as "Hawaiian style". Hawaiian music began its assimilation into American popular music in the 1910s, but with English
lyrics
Lyrics are words that make up a song, usually consisting of verses and choruses. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist. The words to an extended musical composition such as an opera are, however, usually known as a "libretto" and their writer, ...
; a combination Hawaiians called ''
hapa haole'' (half-white). In the 1930s, the invention of
electric amplification for the lap steel was a milestone in its evolution. It meant that the instrument could be heard equally with other instruments, that it no longer needed a resonance chamber to produce its sound, and that electrified lap steels could be manufactured in any shape (even a rectangular block), with little or no resemblance to a traditional guitar.
In the early twentieth century Hawaiian music and the steel guitar began to meld into other musical styles, including
blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form that originated among African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues has incorporated spiritual (music), spirituals, work songs, field hollers, Ring shout, shouts, cha ...
,
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, h ...
,
gospel
Gospel originally meant the Christianity, Christian message ("the gospel"), but in the second century Anno domino, AD the term (, from which the English word originated as a calque) came to be used also for the books in which the message w ...
,
country music
Country (also called country and western) is a popular music, music genre originating in the southern regions of the United States, both the American South and American southwest, the Southwest. First produced in the 1920s, country music is p ...
and, particularly, the country music sub-genres
Western swing
Western swing, country jazz or smooth country is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, which att ...
,
honky-tonk, and
bluegrass. Lap steel pioneers include
Sol Hoopii
Sol or SOL may refer to:
Astronomy
* The Sun
* Mars sol, solar day on Mars
* Solar System
Currency
* SOL Project, a currency project in France
* French sol, or sou
* Argentine sol
* Bolivian sol, the currency of Bolivia from 1827 to 1864
* Peru ...
,
Bob Dunn,
Jerry Byrd,
Don Helms,
Bud Isaacs,
Leon McAuliffe,
Josh Graves,
Pete Kirby, and
Darick Campbell.
Conceptually, a lap steel guitar may be likened to playing a guitar with one finger (the bar). This abstraction illustrates one of the instrument's major limitations: its constraint to a single
chord that is not changeable during a performance without re-tuning the instrument. An early solution was to build lap steel guitars with two or more
necks, each providing a separate set of differently-tuned strings on a single instrument. The performer's hands could move to a different neck at will. Although in the early 1940s, elite players recorded and performed with these multi-neck guitars, most musicians could not afford them. The problem was addressed in 1940 by adding pedals to the lap steel to change the pitch of certain strings easily, making more complex chords available on the same neck. By 1952, this invention revolutionized how the instrument was played, in many ways making it virtually a new instrument, known as a "
pedal steel". An overwhelming majority of lap steel players adopted the pedal design, and, as a result, the lap steel became largely obsolete by the late 1950s, with only pockets of devotees in country and Hawaiian music remaining.
Early history

Spanish guitars were introduced into the
Hawaiian Islands
The Hawaiian Islands () are an archipelago of eight major volcanic islands, several atolls, and numerous smaller islets in the Pacific Ocean, North Pacific Ocean, extending some from the Hawaii (island), island of Hawaii in the south to nort ...
as early as the 1830s.
The Hawaiians did not embrace the standard guitar tuning that had been in use for centuries.
They re-tuned the guitars to make a chord when all the strings were sounded together, known as an "
open tuning".
This was called "slack-key", known in
Hawaiian as "''kī hōʻalu''",
because certain strings were "slackened" to achieve it.
Hawaiians learned to play
fingerstyle this way, creating melodies over the full resonant tones of the open strings, and the genre became known as
slack-key guitar
Slack-key guitar (from Hawaiian ''kī hōalu'', which means "loosen the uningkey") is a fingerstyle genre of guitar music that originated in Hawaii. This style of guitar playing, which has been used for centuries, involves altering the standard ...
.
About 1885, after guitar strings made of steel
became available,
Joseph Kekuku, on the island of
Oahu
Oahu (, , sometimes written Oahu) is the third-largest and most populated island of the Hawaiian Islands and of the U.S. state of Hawaii. The state capital, Honolulu, is on Oahu's southeast coast. The island of Oahu and the uninhabited Northwe ...
developed and popularized playing an open tuning while seated with the guitar across his knees while pressing a steel bar against the strings.
Following Kekuku's lead, other Hawaiians began playing in this new manner, with the guitar laid across the lap, instead of in the traditional way of holding the instrument against the body.
Once the horizontal style became popular throughout the islands, the technique spread internationally, and was referred to (typically outside of Hawaii) as "Hawaiian style".
Hawaiian music, with the sound of the steel guitar as a marked featured of it, became a popular musical preoccupation or
fad
A fad, trend, or craze is any form of collective behavior that develops within a culture, a generation, or social group in which a group of people enthusiastically follow an impulse for a short time period.
Fads are objects or behaviors tha ...
in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.
In 1916, recordings of indigenous Hawaiian music outsold all other U.S. musical genres.
This popularity initiated the manufacture of guitars designed specifically to be played horizontally.
The archetypal lap steel guitar is the acoustic Hawaiian guitar.
Despite incorporating a resonant chamber in their body, these early acoustic versions of the instrument were not loud enough relative to other instruments. However, in the early 1930s a steel guitarist named
George Beauchamp invented the
electric guitar pickup.
Electrification not only allowed the lap steel guitar to be heard better, but it also meant that their resonance chambers were no longer essential, or even required.
The result was that steel guitars could be manufactured in any shape – even in the form of a rectangular block bearing little or no resemblance to the traditional guitar shape.
This led to table-like instruments in a metal frame on legs called "
console steels".
Types of lap steel guitars
There are three categories of lap steel guitars:
* Acoustic lap steel guitars: These are traditional acoustic
steel-string acoustic guitar
The steel-string acoustic guitar is a modern form of guitar that descends from the gut-strung Romantic guitar, but is strung with steel strings for a brighter, louder sound. Like the modern classical guitar, it is often referred to simply ...
s modified to be played on the performer's lap.
The modification is to raise the strings higher off the fingerboard than a traditional guitar, which can be done by inserting an adapter on the instrument's
bridge
A bridge is a structure built to Span (engineering), span a physical obstacle (such as a body of water, valley, road, or railway) without blocking the path underneath. It is constructed for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle, whi ...
and its
nut.
This prevents the steel bar from hitting against the frets.
*
Dobro-type guitars or
National guitars: These are typically acoustic steel guitars with a large aluminum cone under the bridge, called a
resonator
A resonator is a device or system that exhibits resonance or resonant behavior. That is, it naturally oscillates with greater amplitude at some frequencies, called resonant frequencies, than at other frequencies. The oscillations in a reso ...
, that increases volume output.
Wood-body resonator guitars are called "Dobros" and steel bodied ones are called "Nationals".
The types do not sound the same — the Nationals are brassier and are usually preferred by blues players.
Either type offers round necks (Spanish) or square necks (Hawaiian).
Square necks are sometimes necessitated both by the use of thicker strings and by the increased force the instrument is subject to as a consequence of its raised strings.
* Electric lap steel guitars: Describes instruments that are specifically designed to be played horizontally and feature an electric
pickup so that they do not require any resonance chamber. Guitars in this category may differ markedly from one another in external appearance, and include instruments made from rectangular solid blocks of wood.
Some may be small enough to be played on the lap; others may have more than one
neck
The neck is the part of the body in many vertebrates that connects the head to the torso. It supports the weight of the head and protects the nerves that transmit sensory and motor information between the brain and the rest of the body. Addition ...
(making the instrument heavier), and may be built on a frame with legs, which is then known as a
console steel.
Tunings
Over centuries in Western countries, the traditional
Spanish guitar developed a near-universal
tuning of ascending fourths (and one major third) consisting of E–A–D–G–B–E;
however, no such standard existed for the Hawaiian "open tunings" (guitar tuned in a chord). The Hawaiians simply tuned to a chord that suited the singer's voice.
Beginning in the days of slack-key guitar in the 1850s, Hawaiian tunings came to be as closely guarded as any trade secret, handed down in families.
Many players de-tuned their instruments when they were not playing them to keep others from discovering their tuning.
The tuning chosen for these instruments is a crucial foundation on which steel guitar style is built.
The tuning used determines the notes that the player has available in a chord, and affects how notes can be played in sequence.
Experimenting with different tunings was a widespread practice of the Hawaiian music of the 1930s
and provided templates that became a foundation for the playing style of later musicians.
Scores of tunings are available for lap steel players.
The addition of a
sixth interval into a tuning had a dramatic effect on the steel guitar because it created numerous positions and playing pockets which were not accessible in a simple
major chord
In music theory, a major chord is a chord (music), chord that has a root (chord), root, a major third, and a perfect fifth. When a chord comprises only these three notes, it is called a major Triad (music), triad. For example, the major triad bui ...
.
The
C6 was a common tuning for six string lap steels in the 1920s and 1930s.
Tunings with a sixth interval are popular in Western swing and jazz, while tunings containing
sevenths are often chosen for blues and rock music.
A fundamental challenge of lap steel guitar design is the inherent constraint it places on the number of chords and
inversions available in any given tuning.
To address the meager array available to them, some early players would simply have a second lap steel at hand, with a different tuning, ready when needed.
Another strategy was to increase the number of strings on the instrument
(the more strings available, the smaller the pitch intervals between them, and therefore more notes available when the
bar is placed straight across the strings).
A third strategy was to add additional necks to the same instrument, thus providing separate sets of strings that could each be tuned differently.
The Hawaiian "craze" in the United States
In the
U.S. Mainland in the early 20th century, after the 1898
annexation of Hawaii,
the Hawaiian "
craze"
was in full force, as evidenced by radio broadcasts,
stage shows,
and motion pictures
featuring Hawaiian music.
Hollywood
Hollywood usually refers to:
* Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California
* Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States
Hollywood may also refer to:
Places United States
* Hollywood District (disambiguation)
* Hollywood ...
films perpetuated the musical image of an idealized island lifestyle.
Hawaiian guitars and lessons for youth were widely available. For example, the
Oahu Music Company
The Oahu Music Company was a music education program in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s to teach students to play the Hawaiian Guitar. Popular culture in America became fascinated with Hawaiian music during the first half of the twent ...
sold their ''Oahu''-brand guitars and lessons to young people by door-to-door sales, canvassing nearly every city in the United States.
The steel guitar was the first "foreign" musical instrument to gain a foothold in American pop music.
Pioneer lap steel players between 1915 and 1930 included
Sol K. Bright Sr.,
Tau Moe,
Dick McIntire,
Sam Ku West and
Frank Ferera. Ferera was the most-recorded of any lap-style guitarists in that time period.
Hawaiian music began to meld into American popular music in the 1910s – a combination Hawaiians called ''
hapa haole'' (half-white)
– which was essentially Hawaiian music, sung in English,
intended for white audiences.
As an example, Honolulu-born
Dick McIntire and his ''Harmony Hawaiians'' recorded Hawaiian songs sung by American pop crooner
Bing Crosby
Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby Jr. (May 3, 1903 – October 14, 1977) was an American singer, comedian, entertainer and actor. The first multimedia star, he was one of the most popular and influential musical artists of the 20th century worldwi ...
in 1936.
Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley was a collection of History of music publishing, music publishers and songwriters in New York City that dominated the American popular music, popular music of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Originally ...
obliged the demand for Hawaiian songs by publishing a large supply of ''hapa haole'' music.
Many amateur and professional musicians throughout America formed Hawaiian combos in the 1930s and 1940s.
The introduction of electrified guitars in the 1930s had a profound effect, boosting commercial Hawaiian music.
Lap steel pioneers
In the development of lap steel guitar in the early twentieth century, many innovators contributed; among the most prominent were:
Sol Ho'opi'i (pronounced Ho-OH-pee-EE) was perhaps the most famous Hawaiian musician whose work spread the sound of instrumental lap steel play worldwide.
He was the first steel guitarist to combine Hawaiian music with American jazz.
Born in Honolulu in 1902, Hoopii was a gifted talent on lap steel from an early age. When he was a teenager, he stowed away on a
Matson liner on its journey from Hawaii to San Francisco. After his arrival in California, he formed a trio and became well known in clubs, theaters, movie appearances and recordings from 1925 to 1950.
He combined Hawaiian music with the jazz he heard from clarinet and horn players. He was a trendsetter in his use of the metal-bodied National Tricone guitar and, later, the
Rickenbacker
Rickenbacker International Corporation is a string instrument manufacturer based in Santa Ana, California. Rickenbacker is the first known maker of electric guitars, with a steel guitar in 1932, and produces a range of electric guitars and bass ...
Bakelite
Bakelite ( ), formally , is a thermosetting polymer, thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin, formed from a condensation reaction of phenol with formaldehyde. The first plastic made from synthetic components, it was developed by Belgian chemist ...
(''
see photo above'') and Dickerson electric steels.
Bob Dunn was the first steel guitarist of renown playing Western swing.
Born in 1908 in
Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, he quit school in the eighth grade to join traveling musical troupes.
Considered a musical revolutionary,
according to music writer Michael Ross, Bob Dunn played the first electrified instrument of any type on a commercial recording.
It was a Western swing tune released in 1935, performed by Dunn in collaboration with "
Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies".
The guitar he played was a Rickenbacker A22, nicknamed the "
Frying Pan".
Formerly a trombone player, Dunn's guitar playing introduced horn-like solos, with the
staccato
Staccato (; Italian for "detached") is a form of Articulation (music), musical articulation. In modern notation, it signifies a note of shortened duration, separated from the note that may follow by silence. It has been described by theorists and ...
phrasing of jazz players, and, according to historian Andy Volk, was of indelible influence on subsequent generations of steel players.
Jerry Byrd was born in
Lima
Lima ( ; ), founded in 1535 as the Ciudad de los Reyes (, Spanish for "City of Biblical Magi, Kings"), is the capital and largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón River, Chillón, Rímac River, Rímac and Lurín Rive ...
, Ohio, in 1920.
As a youth, he attended a traveling tent show that came to town; it was a troupe of Hawaiians playing Hawaiian music and featured a polished National steel guitar. Byrd was smitten by the sound as well as the physical appearance of the instrument and said, "That was the day that changed my life".
In a musical career divided between Hawaiian music and country music, Byrd helped lay the foundation for the Nashville steel guitar sound.
He is credited with developing the C
6 tuning that became the standard of C
6 pedal steels.
With
Hank Williams
Hiram "Hank" Williams (September 17, 1923 – January 1, 1953) was an American singer, songwriter, and musician. An early pioneer of country music, he is regarded as one of the most significant and influential musicians of the 20th century. W ...
, Byrd recorded songs like "
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry
"I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" is a song written and recorded by American country music singer-songwriter Hank Williams in 1949. The song has been covered by a wide range of musicians.
Authorship and production
Various writers quoted Williams ...
", "
Lovesick Blues" and "
A Mansion on the Hill". Byrd also recorded with
Marty Robbins
Martin David Robinson (September 26, 1925 – December 8, 1982), known professionally as Marty Robbins, was an American country and western singer and songwriter. He was one of the most popular and successful singers of his genre for most o ...
,
Hank Snow
Clarence Eugene "Hank" Snow (May 9, 1914 – December 20, 1999) was a Canadian country music guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He recorded 140 albums and charted more than 85 singles on the ''Billboard (magazine), Billboard'' country charts betw ...
,
Ernest Tubb and others.
After his Nashville career, Byrd made Hawaii his permanent home.
Western Swing

In the early 1930s, the newly electrified lap steel guitar took a prominent position in a type of dance music known as "
Western swing
Western swing, country jazz or smooth country is a subgenre of American country music that originated in the late 1920s in the West and South among the region's Western string bands. It is dance music, often with an up-tempo beat, which att ...
",
a form of
jazz swing that combined elements of country music and Hawaiian music.
Pioneers of the genre include bandleaders Milton Brown
and Bob Wills.
Wills in turn hired and nurtured innovative players, who subsequently influenced the genre, including
Leon McAuliffe,
Noel Boggs, and
Herb Remington.
In October, 1936,
Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys
James Robert "Bob" Wills (March 6, 1905 – May 13, 1975) was an American musician, songwriter, and bandleader. Considered by music authorities as the founder of Western swing, he was known widely as the King of Western Swing (although Spade Co ...
and McAuliffe, performing with a Rickenbacker B–6 lap steel, recorded the remarkably well selling record, "
Steel Guitar Rag".
Due to the need to have different chords or
voicings available, the design of the lap steel and the way it was played underwent continual change as the style evolved.
McAuliffe had two Rickenbackers, each tuned differently.
The instrument's constraints caused leading steel guitarists to add
additional necks with different tunings on the same instrument.
Lap steels were the first multi-neck electric instruments.
The added size and weight meant that the instrument could no longer be reasonably supported on the player's lap and required placement in a frame with legs known as a "console" steel guitar, that is still ostensibly a lap steel.
Prominent players of that era, including Herb Remington
and Noel Boggs,
accommodated by instrument maker
Leo Fender, eventually played instruments with four different necks.
Honky-tonk
By the late 1940s, the steel guitar featured prominently in the emerging "
honky-tonk" style of country music, developed in Texas and Oklahoma bars and dance halls (called honky-tonks).
The style features a simple
two-beat sound with a prominent
backbeat
In music and music theory, the beat is the basic unit of time, the pulse (regularly repeating event), of the ''mensural level'' (or ''beat level''). The beat is often defined as the rhythm listeners would tap their toes to when listening to a pi ...
.
Honky-tonk singers who used a lap steel guitar in their musical arrangements included Hank Williams,
Lefty Frizzell
William Orville "Lefty" Frizzell (March 31, 1928 – July 19, 1975) was an American country and honky-tonk singer-songwriter.
Frizell is known as one of the most influential country music vocal stylists of all time. He has been cited as in ...
and
Webb Pierce.
Don Helms (1927–2008), born in
New Brockton, Alabama, played a double-neck
Gibson lap steel using an E
6 and a B
11 tuning
on recordings by all three of these artists, as well as on more than 100 Hank Williams songs, including "
Your Cheating Heart", "
I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love with You)" and "
Cold, Cold Heart".
Helms' playing style helped move country music away from the hillbilly string-band sound popular in the 1930s and toward the more modern electric style that took over in the 1940s.
His guitar
intros,
leads
Lead () is a chemical element; it has Chemical symbol, symbol Pb (from Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a Heavy metal (elements), heavy metal that is density, denser than most common materials. Lead is Mohs scale, soft and Ductility, malleabl ...
, and
fills have been widely imitated for 50 years.
Other classic country recordings featuring Helms' work were "
Walkin' After Midnight
"Walkin' After Midnight" is a song written by Alan Block and Don Hecht and recorded by American country music artist Patsy Cline. The song was originally given to pop singer Kay Starr, but her label rejected it. The song was left unused until He ...
" (
Patsy Cline
Patsy Cline (born Virginia Patterson Hensley; September 8, 1932 – March 5, 1963) was an American singer. One of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century, she was known as one of the first country music artists to successfully Cross ...
) and "
Blue Kentucky Girl" (
Loretta Lynn
Loretta Lynn (; April 14, 1932 – October 4, 2022) was an American country music singer and songwriter. In a career spanning six decades, Lynn released multiple gold albums. She had numerous hits such as "Hey Loretta", "The Pill (song), The P ...
). Many recordings of that era (1950s) were made using a steel guitar tuning in a
sixth chord
The term ''sixth chord'' refers to two different kinds of Chord (music), chord, one in classical music and the other in modern popular music.
The original meaning of the term is a ''chord in first inversion'', in other words with its third (chord) ...
, often a
C6, which is sometimes called a "Texas tuning".
Dobro
The
Dobro
Dobro () is an American brand of resonator guitars owned by Gibson and manufactured by its subsidiary Epiphone. The term "dobro" is also used as a generic term for any wood-bodied, single-cone resonator guitar.
The Dobro was originally a gui ...
or
resonator guitar
A resonator guitar or resophonic guitar (often generically called a " Dobro") is an acoustic guitar that produces sound by conducting string vibrations through the bridge to one or more spun metal cones (resonators), instead of to the guitar' ...
is a uniquely American lap steel guitar with a resonator cone designed to make a guitar louder.
It was patented by the
Dopyera brothers in 1927,
but the name "Dobro", a portmanteau of DOpyera and BROthers, became a generic term for this type of guitar.
The dobro never became popular with blues players, who generally prefer the
National guitar, which has a similar resonator design but uses a metal body.
In the opinion of music writer
Richard Carlin, the dobro probably would have disappeared from the musical scene had it not been for two influential players: Pete Kirby and Uncle Josh Graves (Buck Graves).
Beecher "Pete" Kirby (1911–1992), known as
Bashful Brother Oswald, was born in
Sevierville, Tennessee
Sevierville ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Sevier County, Tennessee, United States, located in East Tennessee. The population was 17,889 at the 2020 United States Census.
History
Native Americans of the Woodland period were among th ...
. As a member of
Roy Acuff's "
Smoky Mountain Boys", in 1939 his dobro playing on the
Grand Ole Opry
The ''Grand Ole Opry'' is a regular live country music, country-music Radio broadcasting, radio broadcast originating from Nashville, Tennessee, Nashville, Tennessee, on WSM (AM), WSM, held between two and five nights per week, depending on the ...
helped define country music in its formative years.
Kirby introduced the instrument to a nationwide radio audience.
He played a Dobro Model 27,
and sometimes a steel-bodied National guitar. He was known to perform a comedy act dressed as a
yokel, wearing a wide-brim slouch hat and overalls.
His dobro attracted interest and fascination; he said, "People couldn't understand how I played it and what it was, and they'd always want to come around and look at it."
He stayed with Acuff for 53 years.
Buck "Josh" Graves (aka "
Uncle Josh Graves"), born in 1927, played dobro in the pioneering
Bluegrass band "
Flatt and Scruggs" in 1955.
Graves played a role in establishing dobro as a common fixture in a bluegrass band.
He honed a style that elevated his dobro skills to rival the prowess of his bandmates.
To do so, he abandoned Hawaiian stylings and adopted
hammer-on and
pull-off notes to combine
open strings with fretted notes rapidly; additionally, he adopted a three-finger picking style taught to him by
Earl Scruggs
Earl Eugene Scruggs (January 6, 1924 – March 28, 2012) was an American musician noted for popularizing a three-finger banjo picking style, now called "Scruggs style", which is a defining characteristic of bluegrass music. His three-finge ...
.
Dozens of other bluegrass groups added a dobro after hearing Graves' lightning-fast solos that fit into the bluegrass instrumental style.
He took lap steel guitar to a new level, able to complement the banjo, fiddle, and mandolin.
Dobro fell out of favor in mainstream country music until a bluegrass revival in the 1970s brought it back with younger virtuoso players like
Jerry Douglas
Gerald Calvin Douglas (born May 28, 1956) is an American Dobro and lap steel guitar player and record producer. He is widely regarded as "perhaps the finest Dobro player in contemporary acoustic music, and certainly the most celebrated and prol ...
, whose Dobro skills became widely known and emulated.
Sacred steel
This gospel music tradition, now called "
sacred steel", began in the 1930s church services in the "House of God", a small
African-American
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. ...
denomination where the steel guitar emerged as an alternative to the church organ.
Darick Campbell (1966–2020) was a lap steel player for the gospel band,
The Campbell Brothers, who took the musical tradition from
Pentecostal
Pentecostalism or classical Pentecostalism is a movement within the broader Evangelical wing of Protestantism, Protestant Christianity that emphasizes direct personal experience of God in Christianity, God through Baptism with the Holy Spirit#Cl ...
churches to international fame.
Campbell played a traditional Hawaiian lap steel:
a
Fender Stringmaster 8-string (Fender Deluxe-8).
He regulated the volume up on top of the guitar with his hand as he played and used a
wah pedal
A wah-wah pedal, or simply wah pedal, is a type of effects unit, effects pedal designed for electric guitar that alters the timbre of the input signal to create a distinctive sound, mimicking the human voice saying the onomatopoeia, onomatopoe ...
.
Born in Rochester, New York,
Campbell was a master at mimicking the human singing voice with his guitar. He said, "My method is to always think of my guitar as a voice".
Campbell played many music festivals, but his renown in rock and jazz circles was not well received by church leaders.
The Campbell Brothers parted ways acrimoniously with the Nashville-based House of God Church, Keith Dominion, because the Pentecostal church wanted to keep the band's music within the church walls.
Campbell recorded with The
Allman Brothers and
Medeski Martin and Wood.
Lap slide guitar
Lap slide guitar is not a specific instrument, but a style of playing lap steel that is typically heard in blues or
rock music.
Players of these genres typically use the term "slide" instead of "steel";
they sometimes play the style with a flat pick or with fingers instead of finger picks.
Pioneers in lap slide include
Buddy Woods,
"Black Ace" Turner (who used a small medicine bottle as a slide),
and
Freddie Roulette.
Turner played a National Style 2 square neck Tricone guitar on his lap.
Another blues guitar playing style is called "
slide guitar
Slide guitar is a technique for playing the guitar that is often used in blues music. It involves playing a guitar while holding a hard object (a slide) against the strings, creating the opportunity for glissando effects and deep vibratos that ...
", a hybrid between steel guitar and conventional guitar. It is played with a conventional guitar held flat against the body, fretting the bass strings in the usual way (for rhythm accompaniment), while using a tubular slide (or the neck of a bottle) placed on a finger of the same hand to slide against the treble strings.
In 1923,
Sylvester Weaver was the first to record this style.
In the 1940s, blues players like
Robert Nighthawk
Robert Lee McCollum (November 30, 1909 – November 5, 1967) was an American blues musician who played and recorded under the pseudonyms Robert Lee McCoy and Robert Nighthawk. He was the father of the blues musician Sam Carr. Nighthawk was ind ...
and
Earl Hooker popularized electric slide guitar this way, using a traditional guitar in standard tuning.
The term "bottleneck" was historically used to describe this type of playing.
Early blues players used open tunings, but most modern slide players use both standard and open.
Lap steel obsolescence
The expense of building multiple necks on each guitar made lap steels unaffordable for most players and a more sophisticated solution was needed.
Many inventors sought a mechanical linkage to change the pitch of strings on the steel guitar.
Gibson introduced a pedal steel guitar as early as 1940, but it never caught on.
About 1946,
Paul Bigsby
Paul Adelburt Bigsby (1899–1968) was an American inventor, designer, and pioneer of the solid body electric guitar. Bigsby is best known for designing the Bigsby vibrato tailpiece (also mislabeled as a tremolo arm) and proprietor of Bigsb ...
created a new design for the pedal action, greatly improving it.
Bigsby, working alone in his shop, made guitars for leading players of the day, including
Joaquin Murphey and
Speedy West.
Nashville guitarist
Bud Isaacs received one of Bigsby's two-pedal guitars in 1952.
It was a wooden double–eight string model.
Isaacs experimented with the new pedals in an
E9 tuning, trying to imitate the sound of two fiddles playing in harmony. In doing so, he came upon something new – he innovated pushing the pedal ''while the strings were still sounding''.
This practice had been strictly avoided by other players of the era, because it was considered poor technique and "un-Hawaiian".
Isaacs' intent was to use the pedal mechanism itself as a feature of the music. The technique created a
triad chord, where two lower notes bend up in
glissando
In music, a glissando (; plural: ''glissandi'', abbreviated ''gliss.'') is a wikt:glide, glide from one pitch (music), pitch to another (). It is an Italianized Musical terminology, musical term derived from the French ''glisser'', "to glide". In ...
counterpoint from below, to harmonize with a third note on top that remains unchanged.
The pedal facilitated the move in perfect synchronization and pitch, which was consistent and reliable.
Isaacs tried it in a 1953 recording session on a
Webb Pierce song called "
Slowly".
The song became one of the most-played
country songs of 1954 and was No. 1 on the
Billboard's country charts for seventeen weeks.
Isaacs' guitar became the first pedal steel guitar on a
hit record
A hit song, also known as a hit record, hit single, or simply hit, is a recorded song or instrumental that becomes broadly popular or well-known. Although ''hit song'' means any widely played or big-selling song, the specific term ''hit record'' ...
.
More importantly, the sound was immediately recognized by lap steel (non-pedal) guitarists as something both unique and impossible to produce on a non-pedal lap steel.
Dozens of instrumentalists rushed to get pedals on their steel guitars to imitate the unique bending notes they heard in Isaacs' play.
In the months and years after this recording, instrument makers and musicians worked to duplicate the innovations of Bigsby and Isaacs.
Even though the instrument had been available for over a decade before this recording, the pedal steel guitar emerged as a crucial element in country music after the success of this song.
The pedals allowed playing more complex and versatile music than it was possible on lap steel.
The pedal steel design was adopted by an overwhelming majority of lap steel players in the early 1950s. The resulting new and distinctive style of playing became a defining characteristic of the country music coming out of Nashville for decades thereafter.
In accordance, the ''non''-pedal lap steel became largely obsolete, with only pockets of devotees remaining in country and Hawaiian music.
Jimmy Day was an example of an established lap player who was able to make a successful switch to pedals in mid-career.
Other prominent lap steel players—including Noel Boggs, Jerry Byrd and Joaquin Murphey—refused to switch. According to music historian Rich Kienzle, this decision hindered Boggs' later career.
Speaking about the pedal steel in a 1972 interview, Jerry Byrd said: "Mechanically, there were a lot of bugs, you couldn't keep them in tune, and that drove me crazy"
... So I decided to stay with what I had and keep my identity and ride it out... I never made the change-over."
Joaquin Murphey stayed with the non-pedal lap steel long after his contemporaries had switched over,
and with his C
6 tuning. He felt that the Nashville-standard E
9 was, in his words, a "gimmick".
He stated in a 1995 interview, "I can't do all that fancy Nashville stuff and I hate it anyhow".
See also
*
Steel guitar
A steel guitar () is any guitar played while moving a steel bar or similar hard object against plucked strings. The bar itself is called a "steel" and is the source of the name "steel guitar". The instrument differs from a conventional guitar i ...
*
Pedal steel guitar–(Contains a sample of the song "Slowly")
*
Slack-key guitar
Slack-key guitar (from Hawaiian ''kī hōalu'', which means "loosen the uningkey") is a fingerstyle genre of guitar music that originated in Hawaii. This style of guitar playing, which has been used for centuries, involves altering the standard ...
*
Slide guitar
Slide guitar is a technique for playing the guitar that is often used in blues music. It involves playing a guitar while holding a hard object (a slide) against the strings, creating the opportunity for glissando effects and deep vibratos that ...
Notes
References
External links
Hawaiian Steel Guitar Association– An organization that promotes the development of lap steel guitar.
{{Authority control
Guitars
Continuous pitch instruments
American inventions
Steel guitar
1885 musical instruments