It Came From Hawaii: Steel Guitar, Part 1

Folks who don't know what the steel guitar is called know when they hear it that it means Country. Get some VH1-fed friends near you and put on any big-hair Nashville weeper of the 1970s. When that big sappy twelfth-fret steel guitar lead-in tugs the twang like a hooked fish, watch your friends blanch. Accepting that sound -- loving it -- is the great leap for folks developing a taste for twangy music. The banjo and the fiddle are small and scrappy enough sounds to digest. The steel guitar is big and chewy. It rings like silver and shines like a rhinestone. It's a shorthand, the first sound a rock band enlists and sits up front to denote: Country. Sweetheart of the Rodeo, No Depression, Faithless Street. It's also the first instrument Nashville abandons when they start feeling sheepish about their hillbilly foundations.

The steel guitar sounds to me like mystery. Its expansive glissando and wide weird harmonies blanket in dark velvet the shape of Americana music. Let's just go all the way up the corn stalk: It's magical. I am for magic, mystery, and mysticism in music. I like to feel as though my ear is pressed to a wall on the other side of which is going on some ritual secret and alien. Old recordings can give this feeling. Voices, strings plucked seventy or one hundred years ago resounding parallel in time with now -- that's fucking magical. A warm fog of plate reverb can give this feeling. The steel guitar can give this feeling.

Any tool can sit down and strum an E-minor chord on a flat-top guitar and make it sound like music. But the pedal steel guitar, the object itself, is a puzzle. It requires a degree of initiation just to know where to put your hands and feet. Two necks, eight strings on each suspended like phone lines over a highway. A whole language of tunings. Mechanical accessories: a metal bar maneuvered at angles, finger picks. Pedals and levers at the feet and knees. Sit down behind one, it's like manning a Victorian flying machine.

Oahu, the Cradle of Bottleneck Blues

I wanted to write about steel guitar for Hickory Wind. I picked up a new Sol Hoopii CD. I turned over some cursory stones, Google and liner notes and books I already owned. I found a tangle. Slide-fretted guitar is a braid of musical miscegenation, stitched into across around the fabric of American music.

Start in Hawaii. Portuguese cowboys had brought the Spanish guitar to the islands in the mid Nineteenth century. They strummed their lonesome cattle calls all along the Makawao range, and the native folks dug it, took it up, ran with it. Joseph Kekuku, a kid in a rural Oahu village, learned to play traditional Hawaiian tunes on the guitar. He jammed with his buddy Samuel, a fiddle-player. And he messed around sliding odd objects over the strings -- a comb, a razor blade. He forged a steel bar for just this purpose around 1889. The keening glissando of Kekuku's new technique -- an organic sound, approximating the vibrato and breaks and weepy sweeps of the human voice but touching the otherworldly -- made stirring accompaniment to sentimental Hawaiian traditional tunes, the way the fiddle complements a maudlin Scottish tune, or a shreddy Marshalled-up Strat gives the tear to a power ballad.

Around the turn of the century, Kekuku and others brought his sound to the mainland, where for the next forty years folks went nuts for it. Hawaiian medicine shows toured the continent. Eventually Hawaiian steel guitar featured in a bunch of movies and classy Tiki-themed nightclubs. Umbrella cocktails, grass skirts, that kind of junk -- the music glazed over with a bourgeois fetishism for the exotic, not unlike the hillbilly craze of the 1950s, or my own fetish for old-timey mysticism.

But beyond Hulapolitan ethnic novelty, the country musics of the South took an earnest interest in the high lonesome Hawaiian sound. Folks like Jimmie Rodgers and Roy Acuff gave the steel guitar a can of beer and a cowboy hat and sat it at the front of the ensemble. Eminent Mississippi bluesman Bukka White set his guitar in his lap and drew his bottleneck riffs with a steel bar, in the Hawaiian style. Historian Nick Tosches in his essential book Country goes as far as to call "Jack o' Diamonds Blues," Blind Lemon Jefferson's earliest bottleneck recording, "Hawaiian-derived."

Here's the tangle, though. Go back fifty or a hundred or two hundred years to the American South. Blacks kids across Florida, Alabama, Mississippi had been nailing a single wire to a board, or a doorframe, or the side of a barn, and fretting the string with some sort of slide, for maybe as long as there have been black kids in the South. They called the instrument a diddley bow, or a jitterbug.

Alan Lomax writes about the diddley bow in his book The Land Where the Blues Began. He traces the instrument to Africa, where folks used gourd cups as slides on what he calls the one-stringed African zither. These instruments by a sight pre-date the Makawao cowpokes of the 1850s. Lomax also links the diddley bow technique -- its polyrhythms and notation-defying slides -- to the bottleneck self-accompaniment of your typical Coahoma County bluesman.

There's a paper on the web dealing with the diddley bow's origins in Africa. In its tantalizing first page the paper traces the washtub bass to an African "earth bow." But alas -- the full text is for members only, and I ain't a member. I also tried to e-mail Eddie Osborne, a Florida expert on African diaspora folk instruments, to see what he had to say on the theory of Hawaii as the cradle of the country Blues, and where the jitterbug fits in. No dice there yet.

I'll maybe have more on this tangle between African and Hawaiian slide-fretted guitar in future entries. Comments here are more than welcome.

(Coming in Part 2: Sol Hoopii, My Own Private Idaho, and Betty Boop.)