- For centuries, cultures around the world have crafted musical instruments from whatever materials were on hand. Many people found that moving objects across stringed instruments emitted a strange but appealing sound.
For example, in West Africa, explorers found natives using musical bows made out of a string attached to a gourd, which was used as a resonator. Musicians played this instrument by plucking the string and using a bone or other material to vary the pitch.
When the slave trade was in full swing, African musicians brought this curious instrument into the southern half of America. The instrument was so easy to make and required very little precision. Slaves easily assembled them from available materials, and the sounds of the slide began reverberating across America, especially in the South. - Natives of Hawaii and the Pacific Island had instruments similar to those found in Africa, as did those from India and Asia. As individuals from more and more cultures flocked to mainland America, the use of slide instruments became more prevalent.
The slide guitar style was also influenced by the Hawaiian slack guitar style. This particular style developed mere decades before the slide guitar hit America. It was a unique methodology in that one hand was used to play both the rhythm and the melody. The difficulty lay in getting the thumb to steadily play the rhythm while the other fingers played the melody.
The Hawaiian masters of slack guitar and the American masters of the slide guitar share many common techniques and traits. This is because both styles pose uncommon challenges to the players. - The diddley bow rapidly became a primer for future slide guitar legends. This childhood toy was usually homemade and very simplistic. A single wooden board and a lone wire string were screwed together and played by plucking. A slide could be used to vary the pitch.
This is very similar to the techniques for the slide guitar, and gave budding musicians, at a very early age, the opportunity to develop the skills and techniques that would trademark their careers. Examples of these diddley bow musicians are jazz pianist Cooper-Moore, blind musician Velcro Lewis, and American blues artist Seasick Steve.
One of the most memorable blues musicians that began with this instrument was Lonnie Pitchford of Mississippi. He frequently demonstrated the instrument while sitting on the front porch of his home. His love of the diddley bow was so profound that, following his death in 1998, the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund placed a unique headstone on his grave that had a playable diddley bow on the side. - A common name for the slide guitar is "bottleneck" guitar. This is because, in many instances, the most convenient slide was often made from the neck of a glass bottle, slipped over the guitarist's finger.
While there are many glass, ceramic and porcelain bottleneck slides manufactured around the world, any object that is between one to three inches long and made of a material such as glass, steel or chrome is effective. Some musicians prefer the effect of knives, shot glasses, or stones to actual bottleneck-shaped items. - The sounds of the slide guitar gained widespread notoriety in 1984 when a Hawaiian musician named Joseph Kekeku was recorded as he fretted his guitar with a comb. This recording became immensely popular, and other musicians began duplicating the style.
Around the same time, a new music genre was being developed in the Mississippi Delta. Although it would not become immensely popular until the late 1920s, the blues style of music was gaining ground. It had a notable slide style that added to the mournful melodies, often sounding like a human vocalization.
In the 1940s, when the electric guitar made its debut, blues musicians were spreading across the country. Many of these talented individuals were fleeing the unemployment of the South to the blossoming industrial metropolises of Chicago and New York. The music caught on like wildfire, taking on a whole new life with the electric guitar. - The mournful effects of the slide guitar appeal to a wide variety of audiences, and have been used in a wide variety of musical genres. Modern country music would not be what it is today without the slide of a steel guitar. Rock and roll has contained memorable slide riffs. The existence of the slide guitar is a defining trait of American blues.
From Africa to America and the Pacific, the soulful sounds of a slide guitar can be heard in many genres of music in nearly every area of the world.
- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -