sTEEL gUITAR sLIDES on

By: Alex Barnard

It’s both the sound of Bikini Bottom and the American open road. Slide guitar can evoke the joy of a beach vacation and yearning for the wilderness through its wailing sound. Little did Joseph Kekuku know as a schoolboy in the 1880s, sliding a comb across a guitar resting on his knees was about to birth a tonal shift in multiple musical genres.

Although the sound is ubiquitous in a variety of styles, many are perhaps not familiar with what exactly creates it. Steel guitars can be played upright, known as bottleneck style, or across the lap, as a ‘lap steel’. The latter was popularised at the end of the 19th century in Hawaii, spreading to America with artists such as Sam Ku West and Frank Ferera. This came largely as a result of Hawaii’s new status as a U.S. territory, which increased interest in its culture overseas.

Carrying the tradition over to the US was spearheaded by Jimmie Rodgers in the twenties and thirties, whose music heavily featured steel guitar. Its use in country music ranges from honky tonk to bluegrass. Slide was also used by artists like Willie Nelson in the 1970s to create a wild sound contrasting with the highly-produced ‘Nashville Sound’ popularised by Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley.

The sound of slide guitar has been influential in characterising modern music too. Faye Webster is one artist pioneering the steel guitar in her music. Webster’s gentle tone and wistful subject matter is often paired with unusual instrumentation for pop. This ranges from saxophone to string ensemble, and most importantly, steel guitar. ‘Right Side of My Neck’ and ‘Hurts Me Too’ feature gentle slide guitar backings which mirror the vulnerability of Webster’s lyrics.

ML Buch also employs slide-guitar-esque techniques in her spacey canon, notably in the aptly-named ‘Slide’ from her album Suntub. A sequence of chordal wanderings, the piece ambles hauntingly between harmonies. This seems far from the jovial Hawaiian music from which the technique derives, closer to the yearning tone for which slide guitar is also known.

Pedal steel guitar can also be found on social media, notably in videos shared by Luke Bergman, a musician and arranger from Seattle, Washington. His swelling steel guitar tone compliments arrangements ranging from Ravel and Grieg to the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel. While it looks effortless in recordings, slide guitar can be an unwieldy beast. Despite using open tunings, intonation can be fiddly and unwanted noise during chord transitions isn’t unusual. 

Listening from thousands of miles away, slide guitar music can seem a world away from British musical history, yet it’s hard not to have a soft spot for the wailing instrument. Its gentle and lulling tone is enduringly popular in music to this day, with a future stretching far beyond the musical experiments of a Hawaiian schoolboy.