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    Slide Guitar: Know the Players, Play the Music
    Slide Guitar: Know the Players, Play the Music
    Slide Guitar: Know the Players, Play the Music
    Ebook226 pages2 hours

    Slide Guitar: Know the Players, Play the Music

    By Pete Madsen

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    About this ebook

    Another entry in the Fretmaster series, this book teaches you both the history and technique of slide guitar's masters, such as Brian Jones, Lowell George, Bonnie Raitt, and Robert Johnson. While exploring their musical lives and legacy, Slide Guitar provides lessons that give you the skills and encouragement you need to emulate these musical heroes. The accompanying audio offers specially recorded backing tracks in blues, folk, country, and rock, allowing you to play along in your favorite style and explore new sounds.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRowmanLittlefield
    Release dateAug 1, 2005
    ISBN9781476853239
    Slide Guitar: Know the Players, Play the Music

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      Book preview

      Slide Guitar - Pete Madsen

      players.

      STYLES & PLAYERS

      Slide Guitar

      STYLES & PLAYERS

      IN 1919, a 17-year-old Hawaiian boy named Solomon Ho’opi’i Ka’ai stowed away on an ocean liner bound for the United States. His dream was to make music for a living. He arrived in San Francisco and quickly moved to Los Angeles, where he formed a trio with Glenwood Leslie and Lani McIntyre. Little did Sol Hoopii know that the music he would end up recording in the years 1927-38, songs like ‘Hula Blues,’ ‘Farewell Blues,’ and ‘Hawaiian March,’ would influence a legion of guitar players from rural Mississippi, who in turn would influence another legion of guitarists decades later from across the Atlantic ocean. Hoopii did not invent slide guitar, but the popularity of these early Hawaiian ‘slack key’ guitar recordings would go on to be heard around the nation. The sound of a hard comb or steel bar being dragged across the strings had a haunting timbre that would creep into the souls of people around the world.

      From its primitive beginnings to its maturity in the age of electric rock’n’roll, slide guitar has given the guitarist a voice that extends the emotional range of the instrument. The slide allowed guitarists to find the notes between notes; the place between the frets where the slippery quality of human emotion runs. The slide can make the strings growl or whimper; it can be bold and menacing or quiet and sympathetic. The slide can keep a run going, circling the perimeters of chord changes; or it could stop it dead in its tracks and give the listener something to ponder.

      Slide playing is personal; no two slide players sound alike. How can this be when everybody plays the same Robert Johnson riff? But so many variables, from heart to mind to physical approach, dictate how one plays that riff. I could play it and the odds are when you play it back to me it will sound different. It’s because we all hear something different in those notes between the notes, that space where the slide meets the string and is expressed by the individual in an infinite number of ways. Slide playing is elusive and alludes to something we can never fully capture in words.

      So where did it come from, and who were the pioneers of slide?

      Early Hawaiian slide and resonator guitar

      IT IS HARD TO PINPOINT the origin of slide guitar. It really has several origins, including roots in Hawaii and West Africa. In Hawaii, during the 1800s, Portuguese and Mexican sailors introduced guitars to the native population. The Hawaiians adapted the guitar to their own style of music. They tuned the guitar to open chords, often by tuning the guitar ‘down’ or ‘slackening’ the strings. A knife blade, comb, or hone would be dragged across the strings to produce a sustained glissando.

      Joseph Kekeku is credited with inventing the Hawaiian style in the early 1880s. His recordings, along with those of later players such as Hoopii, Frank Ferera and Jim and Bob (The Genial Hawaiians), were well received and popular during the 1920s and early 1930s. It is said that before 1930 every Chinese restaurant, beer garden, and hotel had its own Hawaiian band.

      Hoopii was one of the first guitarists to popularize the steel guitar. The sound of the steel guitar, chillingly evocative, is what many people associate with the sound of early slide playing. Manufactured by the Dopyera brothers, National steel guitars were first conceived as a way for guitarists to compete in volume with a jazz band. The wood guitars of the era were not electrified and could hardly create the same volume as brass or percussion instruments. The National guitars were made of brass or steel, with an innovative ‘resonator’ design that amplified the sound of the strings by the use of a ‘biscuit’ (single cone) or ‘T-bar’ (Tricone) that transferred the vibration of the strings to something resembling a speaker cone(s). These guitars were not only loud; when applying an open tuning and slide techniques to them they produced an even more haunting and evocative sound than that of ordinary wood guitars. That sound is most often associated with rural blues and such players as Charlie Patton, Son House, and Tampa Red.

      The National guitars (and later Dobro guitars: a falling out between business partners led the Dopyera brothers to split off from National and form this new company) came in round and square neck versions. The square neck guitars were meant to be played on the lap, with the strings set far above the neck. These guitars were impossible to fret by conventional standards and were meant to be played strictly with a steel bar slid across the strings. To compensate for their inability to fret the guitar with their hands, square-neck players evolved several different tunings and techniques to allow them to play chords and melodies beyond major and minor triads. The square neck guitars evolved into what country players use today: the pedal steel guitar. The pedal steel is a form of lap-style guitar with as many as three separate necks.

      The round neck Nationals, on the other hand, were meant to be played like a conventional guitar and thus became popular with many blues musicians. Tampa Red was the first blues artist to record with a National. His music was fairly sophisticated for a bluesman and his playing usually accompanied an orchestra or band. In contrast to Red were Son House, Charlie Patton and Bukka White, who played hard driving, primitive yet extremely evocative material that seemed to come from the earth itself.

      Sol Hoopii

      Solomon Ho’opi’I Ka’ai’ai was born in 1902 in Honolulu, Hawaii, the youngest of 21 children. At an early age he began playing ukulele and soon brought the guitar and Hawaiian guitar into his instrumental repertoire. Hoopii’s stowaway trip almost ended in disaster when he and his two companions were discovered on the boat, with the captain of the ship stymied because he couldn’t kick the men off in the middle of the Pacific. The Hawaiian trio’s answer was to charm the passengers with their music. The passengers were so elated they all pitched in to pay the trio’s fare – or so the story goes.

      Hoopii is considered the most influential Hawaiian guitarist of the 20th century. He also had considerable influence on western swing and country pedal steel guitar, and, in as much as he was responsible for popularizing the National guitar, was also an influence on blues artists of the day. (It was reciprocal, however; Hoopii also borrowed a lot from blues players.) When he performed songs like ‘Hula Blues,’ it was hard to deny the influence.

      His group, The Sol Hoopii Novelty Trio, gained a certain amount of fame during the late 1920s as a performing and recording group. Their records were not only a hit nationally, but became international best-sellers. He was so popular at one point that he appeared in several Hollywood movies, including Waikiki Wedding, Song of the Islands, and a few Charlie Chan movies. His playing also adorns the soundtrack to a Betty Boop cartoon, Betty’s Bamboo Isle.

      "Hoopii is considered the most influential Hawaiian guitarist of the 20th century."

      , E (low to high). The new tunings that he discovered opened up chordal and melodic possibilities that the standard Hawaiian tunings (open A or G) did not possess.

      GUITAR: National tricone.

      SONGS: ‘Hula Blues,’ ‘Farewell Blues.’

      The blues slide tradition

      FOR CENTURIES, MUSICIANS in West Africa were using a bow-like instrument strung over a gourd and playing it over their stomachs. This instrument is still used in Africa today and is played by using an object, such as a bone, placed over the string and slid to alter the pitch. African slaves brought to America had very few possessions but were able to adapt and make versions of this instrument by nailing a piece of bailing wire to the floor or wall of a hut and sliding something, once again a bone or metal object, along the string. The early American version of this instrument was called a ‘jitterbug.’ There is also a version of this instrument that still exists today called the ‘diddley bow.’ Now you know where Bo Diddley got his name.

      BE), or open G (DGDGBD). While this may seem like a technical point, it is important to note that the relative pitches of the strings would affect how the player approached the instrument and the phrasing of what they

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