Lap steel guitar

The steel guitar was the first "foreign" musical instrument to gain a foothold in American pop music. It originated in the Hawaiian Islands about 1885, popularized by an Oahu 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 sound, characterized by a smooth gliding between notes, became popular throughout the islands. American popular culture became fascinated with Hawaiian music during the first half of the twentieth century – to the degree of becoming a musical fad. Americans were curious about the lap steel instrument featured in its performance, and came to refer to it as a "Hawaiian guitar",^[a] and the horizontal playing position as "Hawaiian style". Hawaiian music began its assimilation into American popular music in the 1910s, but with English lyrics; 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, jazz, gospel, country music and, particularly, the country music sub-genres Western swing, honky-tonk, and bluegrass. Lap steel pioneers include Sol Hoopii, 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.

Tunings[edit]

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;^[3] 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.^[5] 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.^[5] Many players de-tuned their instruments when they were not playing them to keep others from discovering their tuning.^[18]: 159


The tuning chosen for these instruments is a crucial foundation on which steel guitar style is built.^[19]: 131 The tuning used determines the notes that the player has available in a chord, and affects how notes can be played in sequence.^[19]: 131 Experimenting with different tunings was a widespread practice of the Hawaiian music of the 1930s^[19]: 41 and provided templates that became a foundation for the playing style of later musicians.^[19]: 131 Scores of tunings are available for lap steel players.^[20] 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.^[21] The C⁶ was a common tuning for six string lap steels in the 1920s and 1930s.^[19]: 120 Tunings with a sixth interval are popular in Western swing and jazz, while tunings containing flatted sevenths are often chosen for blues and rock music.^[22]


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.^[19]: 34 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.^[23] Another strategy was to increase the number of strings on the instrument^[19]: 36 (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).^[19]: 36 A third strategy was to add additional necks to the same instrument, thus providing separate sets of strings that could each be tuned differently.^[19]: 36