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 reflect characteristics of the human singing voice. It typically involves playing the guitar in the traditional position (flat against the body) with the use of a slide fitted on one of the guitarist's fingers. The slide may be a metal or glass tube, such as the neck of a bottle, giving rise to the term bottleneck guitar to describe this type of playing. The strings are typically plucked (not strummed) while the slide is moved over the strings to change the pitch. The guitar may also be placed on the player's lap and played with a hand-held bar (lap steel guitar).
"Lap slide guitar" redirects here. For the steel guitar, see Lap steel guitar.Creating music with a slide of some type has been traced back to African stringed instruments and also to the origin of the steel guitar in Hawaii. Near the beginning of the twentieth century, blues musicians in the Mississippi Delta popularized the bottleneck slide guitar style, and the first recording of slide guitar was by Sylvester Weaver in 1923. Since the 1930s, performers including Robert Johnson, Robert Nighthawk, Earl Hooker, Elmore James, and Muddy Waters popularized slide guitar in electric blues and influenced later slide guitarists in rock music, including the Rolling Stones, George Harrison, Duane Allman, and Ry Cooder. Lap slide guitar pioneers include Oscar "Buddy" Woods, "Black Ace" Turner, and Freddie Roulette.
Technique[edit]
The slide guitar, according to music educator Keith Wyatt, can be thought of as a "one-finger fretless guitar".[62] The placement of a slide on a string determines the pitch, functioning in the manner of a steel guitar. The slide is pressed lightly against the treble strings to avoid hitting against the frets. The frets are used here only as a visual reference, and playing without their pitch-constraint enables the smooth expressive glissandos that typify blues music. This playing technique creates a hybrid of the attributes of a steel guitar and a traditional guitar in that the player's remaining (non-slide) fingers and thumb still have access to the frets, and may be used for playing rhythmic accompaniment or reaching additional notes.[63] The guitar itself may be tuned in the traditional tuning or an open tuning. Most early blues players used open tunings, but most modern slide players use both.[12] The major limitation of open tuning is that usually only one chord or voicing is easily available and is dictated by how the guitar is originally tuned.[64]: 131 Two-note intervals can be played by slanting the slide on certain notes.[65]
In the sixteenth century, the notes of A–D–G–B–E were adopted as a tuning for guitar-like instruments, and the low E was added later to make E–A–D–G–B–E as the standard guitar tuning.[66] In open tuning the strings are tuned to sound a chord when not fretted, and is most often major.[67] Open tunings commonly used with slide guitar include open D or Vestapol[b] tuning: D–A–D–F♯–A–D; and open G or Spanish tuning: D–G–D–G–B–D. Open E and open A, formed by raising each of those tunings a whole tone, are also common. Other tunings are also used, in particular the drop D tuning (low E string tuned down to D) is used by many slide players. This tuning allows for power chords, which contain root, fifth and eighth (octave) notes in the bass strings and conventional tuning for the rest of the strings.[69] Robert Johnson, whose playing has been cited by Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, and Johnny Winter as being a powerful influence on them, used tunings of standard, open G, open D, and drop D.[70]
Resonator guitars[edit]
The National String Instrument Corporation produced the first metal-body resonator guitars in the late 1920s (see image at beginning of article).[71] Popular with early slide players, these featured a large aluminum cone, resembling an inverted loudspeaker, attached under the instrument's bridge to increase its volume.[72] It was patented in the late 1920s by the Dopyera brothers and became widely used on many types of guitars, and was adapted to the mandolin and ukulele.
Tampa Red played a gold-plated National Tricone style 4, and was one of the first black musicians to record with it.[73] Delta blues pioneer, Son House, played this type of guitar on many songs including the classic, "Death Letter".[72] A resonator guitar with a metal body was played by Bukka White ("Parchman Farm Blues" and "Fixin' to Die Blues"[c]).
"Lap slide guitar" does not refer to a specific instrument, rather a style of playing blues or rock music with the guitar placed horizontally, a position historically known as Hawaiian style. This is a lap-steel guitar, but musicians in these genres prefer the term slide instead of steel; they sometimes play the style with a flat pick or with fingers instead of finger picks. [75] There are various instruments specifically made (or adapted) to play in the horizontal position, including the following:
Lap slide guitar pioneers[edit]
Buddy Woods was a Louisiana street performer who recorded in the 1930s. He was called "The Lone Wolf" after the title of his most successful song, "Lone Wolf Blues". Between 1936 and 1938, he recorded ten songs that are today considered classics, including "Don't Sell It, Don't Give It Away".[78] Woods recorded five songs for the US Library of Congress in 1940 in Shreveport, Louisiana, including "Boll Weevil Blues" and "Sometimes I Get a Thinkin'".[79][80]
"Black Ace" Turner (born Babe Karo Turner), a blues artist from Texas, was befriended and mentored by Buddy Woods. Historian Gérard Herzhaft said, "Black Ace is one of the few blues guitarists to have played in the purest Hawaiian style, that is, with the guitar flat on the knees." [75] Turner played a square-neck National "style 2" Tri-cone metal body guitar and used a glass medicine bottle as a slide. Turner was also a good storyteller, which enabled him to host a radio program in Fort Worth called The Black Ace.[81] His career effectively ended when he entered military service in 1943.[75] His album, I Am the Boss Card in Your Hand, contained Turner's original 1930s recordings as well as new songs recorded in 1960. Turner was featured in a 1962 documentary film entitled The Blues.[81]
Freddie Roulette (born Frederick Martin Roulette) is a San Francisco-based lap steel blues artist who became interested in the lap steel guitar at an early age and became proficient enough to play in Chicago blues clubs with prominent players.[82] He played an A7 tuning with a slant-bar style and never used finger picks.[83] He earned a spot in Earl Hooker's band and recorded with Hooker in the 1960s.[84] Roulette had played lap steel in other genres before focusing on blues – he stated this helped him add more complex chords to the basic blues played by Hooker and said, "it worked".[85] Roulette was recruited to San Francisco in the mid-1970s by Charlie Musselwhite.[86] In 1997, he recorded a solo album, Back in Chicago: Jammin' with Willie Kent and the Gents, which won Best Blues Album of 1997 by Living Blues Magazine.[87] Roulette's contribution to the lap slide guitar was to prove that a lap-played instrument was capable of holding its own in Chicago blues style.[65]