When you think of Ballads, do you think of story songs? R&B jams? Power solos? Well, don’t worry; OA has something for everyone in the 25th Annual Music Issue!
“I didn’t do any research, ” Luther Dickinson said with a grin as he opened the door to his room at the Washington Square Park Hotel. Dickinson was in New York for a show that evening at Rockwood Music Hall, and he had agreed to talk with me about a question I’d become obsessed with: Did blues slide guitar evolve from the Hawaiian steel guitar or from the African instrument usually claimed as its ancestor? Dickinson’s corner room looked out over the canopy of Washington Square Park, and steel guitar music issued from an iPad on his nightstand. “I put on Hawaiian YouTube, just to get in the mood, ” Dickinson said, placing the device in front of his two-year-old daughter, Isla Belle.
With a slide—a short length of glass bottleneck or metal pipe slipped over a finger, once improvised and now produced as a standard accessory—the most basic acoustic guitar can sing, can sound human, in a way the instrument otherwise cannot. A guitar neck is divided up by frets, the vertical bands that define where one note ends and another begins. The slide bypasses this order, allowing the player to drift between notes, creating an eerie, metallic wail. Contrary to the Hawaiian steel theory, folklorists—and many players like Dickinson—have long believed that the technique evolved from one-stringed instruments used in Africa, knowledge of which was transported to the New World via the slave trade. According to this history, the diddley bow was passed down through generations until it turned up in accounts of the South in the 1930s, forming a link between American blues and its ancestral strains of music on the other side of the Atlantic.
What Happened To Chord House Guitar Room?
Dickinson grew up in the Mississippi hill country south of Memphis and learned to play guitar from bluesmen like R. L. Burnside before forming the North Mississippi Allstars with his brother Cody. As the eldest child of the producer Jim Dickinson, who worked with Ry Cooder and was close to Bukka White and Mississippi Fred McDowell, Luther became a slide master almost by default. He was five when he picked up the guitar, and instead of starting him with the usual fingerings, his father tuned the instrument to an open chord and stuck a bottleneck on Luther’s finger. Dickinson told me he was certain that the blues slide technique originated in Africa. “You can’t discount the fact that these musicians were literally just nailing a piece of broom wire to their porch, ” he said, referring to the diddley bow. “They weren’t trying to play Hawaiian music. They never
The slide guitar has been wailing and moaning in blues music since at least 1903. The bandleader W. C. Handy was dozing off at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, one humid night when “the weirdest music I had ever heard” wafted through the air, as he later wrote in his autobiography,
. It came from “a lean, loose-jointed Negro” who was singing and playing guitar in a way Handy had never seen: by sliding a knife along the strings. “His clothes were rags, his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages.” A vision of the archetypal blues slide guitarist was born. Twenty years later, the Kentuckian Sylvester Weaver, about whom little is known, showed up in New York and made the first recordings to feature slide guitar, a couple of melancholy numbers called “Guitar Rag” and “Guitar Blues.” Okeh Records marketed him as “the man with the talking guitar.” Handy’s account and Weaver’s recordings were the first to capture a style that later developed through the music of Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Muddy Waters, and so on. Over the course of a century, the sound of this peculiar instrument has helped define the music we call blues.
Atlas Of Plucked Instruments
Yet the specific origins of blues slide guitar have never been accounted for in detail, not even by the folklorists who assert its link to the diddley bow. The gaps in this knowledge were partly what led John Troutman to look into blues slide while researching his recent book
. Troutman, a history professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who plays steel guitar himself, knew the diddley bow story and had no reason to doubt it when he started working on his project. Hoping to specify the relationship between blues slide and his main subject, he spent eight years looking at old newspapers, private papers, interviews, and many other sources on the musical culture of the South in the early twentieth century. What he found were Hawaiian musicians playing steel guitar—everywhere. “It certainly wasn’t something I expected, ” Troutman told me. “All of a sudden I saw musicians from all over the world traveling routinely into Mobile, Alabama; Anniston, Alabama; Montgomery; and Selma—all these little towns. That’s when I recognized that there’s a serious rupture in how we have come to understand Southern music up to this point and what you encounter when you actually look in the archives.”
Troutman traces the history of Hawaiian guitar, from its introduction to the islands by foreign sailors in the 1840s to its becoming ubiquitous in the 1870s and 1880s. While Protestant missionaries and American plantation owners wrested control over the islands away from the native royals in the 1890s, a schoolboy named Joseph Kekuku noticed that running a knife or comb along the steel strings of a guitar made an interesting sound. Other cultures with stringed instruments had noticed this, too, but Kekuku developed his discovery into a complete new form. His technique involved tuning the guitar to an open chord, raising the strings high above the fretboard, and running a heavy metal bar (the “steel” after which the style was soon named) over its strings. Instead of holding the guitar up against his chest, he laid it across his knees. Soon Kekuku’s method was widely adopted in the islands, especially for songs that championed the restoration of native Hawaiian rule. It is not an accident that early Hawaiian steel guitar music has a mournful—one might say bluesy—quality. The songs were plaints for a freedom and sovereignty that had just been wrenched away.
Main Room Chord Progressions
“Two native Hawaiian musicians coax amazing harmonic effects from their guitars, a style of melody that has a curious resemblance to that of the violin in its sweetness, ”
Wrote of a 1909 New York performance by Toots Paka’s Hawaiians, a troupe that featured Kekuku himself. Hawaiian players started touring the mainland United States around the turn of the century; by 1916, their music was outselling all other recorded genres in the country. Its popularity lasted for decades. In the South, Hawaiian steel guitarists traveled with vaudeville and tent shows, jamming in the streets to advertise their performances. They also graced the stages of theaters that welcomed mixed audiences. Troutman portrays the Jim Crow South as a place of complex diversity, where Hawaiians played on the early chitlin’ circuit. Their brown skin got them barred from white-owned hotels, forcing them to stay at boardinghouses with black travelers.
Given the popularity of Hawaiian music and the extent to which the musicians mixed into Southern life, it’s easy to imagine their guitar style spreading. That it grew into the lap- and pedal-steel guitars long used in country music is undisputed. But Troutman—along with a few other writers, like Nick Tosches in his 1977 book
Open Chord: Home Of All Things Music In West Knoxville
“I’m very surprised to hear that, and my first reaction would be to disagree, ” Luke Winslow-King told me over the phone from an airport lounge in Detroit. Winslow-King is a thirty-three-year-old roots singer known for his slide guitar style. I thought I’d detected a hint of Hawaiian influence in some of his songs; other critics did, too. But he expressed a view I found common among contemporary blues slide players. “I could see how someone could argue that maybe [Hawaiian] music popularized slide . . . but I’m sure that there were people playing slide music in Africa in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, ” he said. “And that those people came over as slaves and continued the tradition.”
This prevailing theory was popularized by an influential 1970 article by the folklorist David Evans, who insisted that blues slide existed before the Hawaiians, via the diddley bow. “This is surely not a case of imitation by Negroes, ” Evans wrote. Robert Johnson, born around 1911, is supposed to have played a one-string, and Big Joe Williams and Bukka White, both born before 1910, said they did, too. Strangely, though, the diddley bow does not show up in any written accounts of the South before 1930. None. Evans told me this should be expected, given that “we are speaking of a children’s learning instrument, constructed by children out of ‘junk.’” He called the diddley bow “extremely ‘underground’ and informal.” Still, it is difficult for me to believe that
“Two native Hawaiian musicians coax amazing harmonic effects from their guitars, a style of melody that has a curious resemblance to that of the violin in its sweetness, ”
Wrote of a 1909 New York performance by Toots Paka’s Hawaiians, a troupe that featured Kekuku himself. Hawaiian players started touring the mainland United States around the turn of the century; by 1916, their music was outselling all other recorded genres in the country. Its popularity lasted for decades. In the South, Hawaiian steel guitarists traveled with vaudeville and tent shows, jamming in the streets to advertise their performances. They also graced the stages of theaters that welcomed mixed audiences. Troutman portrays the Jim Crow South as a place of complex diversity, where Hawaiians played on the early chitlin’ circuit. Their brown skin got them barred from white-owned hotels, forcing them to stay at boardinghouses with black travelers.
Given the popularity of Hawaiian music and the extent to which the musicians mixed into Southern life, it’s easy to imagine their guitar style spreading. That it grew into the lap- and pedal-steel guitars long used in country music is undisputed. But Troutman—along with a few other writers, like Nick Tosches in his 1977 book
Open Chord: Home Of All Things Music In West Knoxville
“I’m very surprised to hear that, and my first reaction would be to disagree, ” Luke Winslow-King told me over the phone from an airport lounge in Detroit. Winslow-King is a thirty-three-year-old roots singer known for his slide guitar style. I thought I’d detected a hint of Hawaiian influence in some of his songs; other critics did, too. But he expressed a view I found common among contemporary blues slide players. “I could see how someone could argue that maybe [Hawaiian] music popularized slide . . . but I’m sure that there were people playing slide music in Africa in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, ” he said. “And that those people came over as slaves and continued the tradition.”
This prevailing theory was popularized by an influential 1970 article by the folklorist David Evans, who insisted that blues slide existed before the Hawaiians, via the diddley bow. “This is surely not a case of imitation by Negroes, ” Evans wrote. Robert Johnson, born around 1911, is supposed to have played a one-string, and Big Joe Williams and Bukka White, both born before 1910, said they did, too. Strangely, though, the diddley bow does not show up in any written accounts of the South before 1930. None. Evans told me this should be expected, given that “we are speaking of a children’s learning instrument, constructed by children out of ‘junk.’” He called the diddley bow “extremely ‘underground’ and informal.” Still, it is difficult for me to believe that
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