A variant of the guitar, developed in Hawaii in the second half of the 19th century. Early types are classified as chordophones: lutes; later types, such as that depicted in the illustration, are classified as chordophones: zithers. Around 1830 Mexican cattle herders introduced the guitar into Hawaii. The Hawaiians took up the instrument and incorporated it into their own music with appropriate ‘slack key’ or open tuning in which the strings are all tuned to the notes of a major triad. Joseph Kekuku has usually been given credit for introducing the technique of sliding a comb (later the back of a penknife) along the strings of a guitar placed across the knees to produce the glissandos for which Hawaiian music has become known. Kekuku, who developed and popularized the technique beginning in 1885, may have learnt it from a man called Davion, who had come from India; there the technique of playing strings with a rod or slider has been used since the 19th century on the gottuvādyam (a type of fretless vīnā). In the early 20th century this music became popular in the USA, where guitar companies began to market Hawaiian guitars with a raised nut, which held the strings higher above the fingerboard than on a normal guitar, and a steel bar as an accessory for slide playing (hence the name ‘steel guitar’); the use of other objects, such as a bottleneck, for a similar sort of slide playing developed in blues at much the same time, and later became common in country music. Many musicians who played in Hawaiian style adopted the Resonator guitar during the early 1930s, while others took up the earliest manufactured Electric guitar, the Rickenbacker ‘Frying Pan’ (1932), a small steel guitar that was designed to be played across the lap. Leg-mounted electric steel guitars were introduced by the Gibson company during the 1930s. By the 1950s some models had as many as four necks. Another type, the Pedal steel guitar, incorporated knee-levers and several pedals for rapid alterations in tuning.
M. Brisenden: ‘In a Hula Heaven: the Story of the Hawaiian Guitar’, Collusion, no.4 (1983), 10
M. Hood: ‘Musical Ornamentation as History: the Hawaiian Steel Guitar’, YTM, xv (1983), 141–8
HUGH DAVIES/R