While some guitars may have arrived in Hawaii in the early 1800s along with the many European sailors who visited Hawaii, the origin of Hawaiian guitar music is generally attributed to Mexican and Spanish cowboys who were hired by King Kamehameha III around 1832.
It was from the Hawaiian cowboys, or paniolos, that the Hawaiian music tradition of loose key guitar found its roots. This Spanish guitar was a gut string guitar.
However, the precise origins of the Hawaiian steel guitar will never be known for sure.
Today there are three main types of steel guitars: the lap steel guitar, the electric console steel guitar, and the electric pedal steel guitar.
Lap Steel Guitar
As Brad Bechtel describes on his Lap Steel Guitar page:
“Steel guitars were originally invented and popularized in Hawaii. Legend has it that in the mid-1890s, Joseph Kekuku, a Hawaiian schoolboy, discovered the sound while walking along a railroad track playing his Portuguese guitar. He picked up a bolt lying next to the track. and slid the metal along the strings of his guitar. Intrigued by the sound, he taught himself to play using the back of a knife.
Joseph Kekuku
JD Bisignani in his Hawaiian Manual of Moon Publications summarizes the story of Joseph Kekuku:
“Driven by the faint rhythm of an internal sound, he went to the Kamehameha School machine shop and pulled out a steel bar to slide over the strings. To complete the sound, he changed the strings from cat gut to steel and lifted them up. so they don’t hit the frets. Voilà ! Hawaiian music as the world knows it today.
As explained by the Hawaii Steel Guitar Association in its role. Some ‘Steel’ story… “Until his death in Boston in 1932, Kekuku toured the United States and most of Europe teaching and popularizing the Hawaiian steel guitar.”
Brad Bechtel adds: “Other people credited with inventing the steel guitar are Gabriel Davion, an Indian sailor, circa 1885, and James Hoa, a Hawaiian of Portuguese descent.”
Few teachers available
“Although the popularity of the steel guitar was firmly established in Hawaii in the early 1900s, and soon after, in the field of country music, it had few teachers.”
“Those first legendary steel players were in such demand to play and record that they didn’t have time to teach others if they wanted to. Therefore, in the 1960s, the art and technique of playing Hawaiian steel was almost lost. ‘
Steel electric guitar and electric console
The art form itself has seen numerous offshoots and developments in its relatively short life.
As Randy Lewis explains in his The Steel Guitar – A Short History: “With the introduction of amplification in the 1930s, the steel guitar (like the Spanish guitar) gained pickups and became the steel electric guitar.
“Since an acoustic body was no longer necessary and actually caused feedback problems, the steel guitar quickly acquired a solid body and became the first steel back.”
“There is no standard tuning for steel guitar and solid body electric steel allowed instruments to be made with two, three and even four necks, each tuned differently.”
“Multiple collars made holding the instrument in the lap almost impossible, and legs were added, making the first ‘console’ instruments, although some ‘single neck consoles were already being played by’ steelers’ who preferred to stand.”
“At the same time, the steel picked up two more strings (there were a few seven-string steels) and by the end of WWII the double-neck eight-string console was quite standard, although even today there are still many players They prefer a single neck six or eight, especially in Hawaiian and Western music.
Steel electric guitar with pedal
In the early 1950s, various players began experimenting with adding pedals that raised the pitch of a string, and in 1953, Bud Isaacs was the first player to use a steel pedal guitar on a successful recording: Webb Pierce’s “Slowly.” . The sound picked up quickly and many steel players turned to playing the ‘pedal sound’.
Over the years, the sound of the Hawaiian steel guitar has found its way into many forms of American and world music, including blues, hillbilly, country and western music, rock and pop, as well as African and Indian music.
