On a Hawaiian guitar, the player alters pitch by lightly pressing a metal or glass bar against the strings and sliding it around (rather than pushing strings down to the fretboard with fingers, as on the Spanish guitar). The method soon became popular all over Hawaii. He then taught it to his classmates, who carried the style to other islands. Kekuku developed a method of playing this new instrument-called “steel guitar” after the bar used to play it. As a boy, his shop teacher helped him fashion a cylindrical steel bar and metal fingerpicks. Legend has it the guitar was first laid flat by a young Joseph Kekuku on the island of Oahu in 1874. The Hawaiians developed a playing style based on straight major chord tuning called “slack-key” because the strings were slackened relative to standard tuning. The 6-string guitar was introduced there by visiting European sailors in the latter part of the 19th century. It originated, pre-pedals, in the Hawaiian Islands. Its expressive potential is still being expanded, and it’s been adopted worldwide in a variety of musical styles, from the African highlife of King Sunny Adé to the nü-jazz of Nils Petter Molvær.Īloha The pedal steel’s history began before country music existed, far from the centers of hillbilly and honky tonk. Meanwhile, pop, rock, and even avant-garde artists have embraced the instrument. Recently it’s become rare to hear pedal steel on mainstream country radio, though there are signs of a slight return. The instrument’s sinuous string bending and crying sound has long distinguished the songs coming out of Nashville and Bakersfield from pop, rockabilly, and blues. For many, pedal steel guitar is synonymous with country music.
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