The story goes a bit like this…early one morning in the late ‘80’s (and I mean 1880’s), a lone teenager walked down the railway tracks outside Honolulu. He carried with him a regular Spanish Guitar, which had probably arrived on the island via Mexico but it could have equally been brought by Portuguese, American or Japanese sailors who’d been visiting Hawaii since James Cooke’s first visit back in 1778. All of them with songs to sing and stories to tell. But it’s this teenager and his guitar that changed the course of History. As he walked, Joseph Kekuku stopped to pick up a loose bolt from one of the railway sleepers. As he meandered on towards school the bolt slipped from his hand and pleasantly slid down the Guitar’s strings and an idea was planted in his adolescent mind.
You can probably guess that Kekuku went on to develop this idea of using hard objects to slide up and down Guitar strings to produce a new sound. And that the idea took off. Like, really took off. By the turn of the century there were many ‘Slack Key Guitarists’ on the Hawaiian islands – Sol Ho’opi’i, Pale K’Lua, Tan Moe, Helen Louise & Frank Ferera to name but a few. The new style was adapted quickly into a society about to experience some pretty serious changes.
At this point you might be wondering why I’m not telling you about Blues music and the Delta and stuff like that. We’ll get to that. First we need to think a bit more about how this apparently original idea spread like it did and where did it spread to? (OK, so you guessed, ‘America’, but which other major sub continent did it also settle in?)
Other innovations Joseph Kekuku is credited with are; 1) thinking to slacken the strings and 2) playing with the Guitar flat on his knees, strings facing up towards the ceiling. With the strings slackened, (or tuned to an open chord, for example, G or D), players can easily play chords with a hard straight object like a slide (or railway pin). In some ways the perfect way for a beginner to start learning the instrument as you don’t need to configure complex chord shapes, you just hold the bar flat across the strings. With these combined techniques, new sounds were possible. And there were enough musicians around who were eager to explore and develop the style. Think about that. It could have all just ended with the headline, ‘Teenager is late for school and is berated by teachers for trying to play the Guitar with a nail, messing around with the tuning pegs and not even holding the thing correctly!’
Don’t know about you, but when I think of Hawaiian music, I think about something jolly and bouncy and yet calming. Something to lighten the mood and relax. Preferably close to a beach. And there is plenty of that stuff, but early Hawaiian guitar Music also fits perfectly with haunting, sad songs. The slide Guitar technique adds a ghostly wailing and moaning voice. But wait. Why would anybody in Hawaii be sad?
On January 17th 1893, Queen at the time Lili’uokalani, had a pretty bad work day and was forced to announce the conditional surrender of the Kingdom of Hawaii to the United States. “Now, to avoid any collision of armed forces and perhaps the loss of life, I do, under protest, and impelled by said force, yield my authority”. She was keen to add that the measures should be temporary and she looked forward to reclaiming her constitutional authority when America had considered the facts and reinstated her. This obviously never happened and America took over long term and began doing what colonial powers do best. Taking all the best land for themselves and attempting to squash the indigenous culture.
Incidentally, Queen Lili’uokalani was herself a musician and is credited with writing the song ‘Aloha Oe’.
1893 was also the year that Joseph Kekuku left Hawaii for the States in hope of playing his own Music. Ironic really, given that the U.S. was banning all things Hawaiian in Hawaii itself – the songs, the language and by some reports, even surfing and the Hula. Though many Hawaiians resisted, many also left and sought to keep their culture alive elsewhere. A lot of Hawaiian musicians left the islands in the years that followed. A lot. By 1916 the most popular Music genre in the United States was Hawaiian Guitar Music. It outsold all other genres of Music during this time. I’m not suggesting that so many Hawaiians migrated to America that they fundamentally changed the demographics, just that there were enough records being made, enough musicians touring and performing for it to become a craze. It was particularly well received in the southern states apparently.
A quick word on our other hero, the Guitar, at this point. Mass produced steel string guitars were making their way all over America at this time. They were cheaper and more portable than Pianos and they could even be ordered via catalogue. (Handy if you lived in a rural area or if you weren’t allowed into shops that sold instruments due to segregation).
Guitars found their way into the hands of all sorts of musicians – Country, Blues, Jazz. And get this. Such was the popularity of Hawaiian music amongst the American public during this era, Guitar makers often assumed that people would want to play ‘Hawaiian Style’. It was common practice for manufacturers to include instructions on how to raise the nut and play in the Hawaiian way when they shipped the Guitar.
Blues legend Son House apparently referred to the ‘Hawaiian way’ of playing when asked where he first heard slide. It has also been claimed that the likes of Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson mentioned the influence of Joseph Kekuku on their playing. It’s certainly possible that they heard Hawaiian Music on the radio and on record. It’s even probable that Hawaiian musicians crossed paths with black blues players during this time. Hawaiians travelling with Vaudeville shows (travelling variety shows that had a mix of acts – music, drama, magic, dance etc and toured all over the country) would often be banned from staying at white owned hotels because of their brown skin and would end up in boarding houses where the black musicians would also be staying. (Imagine being a fly on the wall at one of those jam sessions!)
It seems that America loved Hawaiian Music and that in the melting pot of the early 20th century ideas were spreading far and wide. Helped ofcourse by the advent of the recording industry and the growth of radio. Probably helped too by the fact that 4 million people had recently been freed from slavery and were spreading out from the South in all directions. Joseph Kekuku himself travelled and performed up and down the West coast with his group ‘Kekuku’s Hawaiian Quintet’, toured Europe for 8 years, returned to the states in 1926, set up a Music school in Chicago and eventually lived out his days in New Jersey. His influence on guitar music is undeniably huge, but, frustratingly, I can’t seem to find any actual recordings credited to him. (Please let me know if you know of any.)
Now we can talk about Delta Blues and all that good stuff. First let’s ask ourselves why we even thought that slide Guitar was a blues invention in the first place? It’s probably because you’ve heard amazing slide guitar on tons of great blues and rock records. You probably heard a version of the story about how hard as nails bluesmen used to break off the neck of a whiskey bottle and use it to slide on the strings. You heard rumours about Robert Johnson and then quickly listened to ‘Cross Road Blues’ to check out the devil himself sliding on the strings. You’ve probably just heard a lot more stories and myths surrounding the Blues and heard a lot more Blues Music and the subsequent genres it inspired than you have Hawaiian Music. That could be part of the reason. Also, remember the bit about the U.S. government illegally occupying Hawaii and actively suppressing its culture? That probably didn’t help the Hawaiian side of the story get through. But the main reason you may have assumed that slide guitar grew out of early Blues is, well, hard to ignore.
Diddley Bow. Yep. It’s a thing. The Diddley Bow, sometimes referred to as a Jitterbug, is a super simple one string instrument that, you guessed it, uses a hard object to slide up and down the string and can produce mournful wailing tones that mimic the human voice. Where can you find one? In the ex slave communities of rural America in the early 19th century. There are different ways of making a Diddley Bow but it’s essentially a wire stretched between two nails on a piece of wood, sometimes with a glass bottle tucked under one end to act as a bridge/resonator. Sometimes people used to just nail one to the side of their porch and have it there on a semi permanent basis.
There isn’t much written about Diddley-Bows before the 1930s but the common logic seems to go that they are the legacy of older African instruments that pre-date the slave trade. Certainly one can find examples of a variety of one string fiddles from various parts of Africa. (The Orutu from Kenya, The Ugandan Indingidi, the Nyanyeryu from West Africa.) So the idea and knowledge of how to make them must have survived through slavery and made it out the other side. Most probably loads of other instruments and musical ideas didn’t survive but, because of the Diddley-Bow’s simplicity, it did. One explanation as to why it wasn’t more commonly spoken about by early Blues artists is that it was a kids instrument. Something for children to mess around and learn on and not seen as a serious instrument. If a child showed promise on the Diddley-Bow they might then graduate to playing the Guitar. Hmmm. It also seems likely then, if kids were learning on Diddley-Bow and progressing on to the Guitar, that surely one of them thought about slide Guitar, right?
I don’t know, I wasn’t there, so I don’t want to assume too much based on limited information. One thing I will say though, is, if you listen to a Diddley-Bow being played [suggested link] then it has a raw quality that is hard to separate from Blues. The repetitive, catchy as hell riffs that underpin so much great Blues music, works perfectly on this one string wonder. If the early Blues musicians did get the idea for slide guitar from Hawaiian style then they certainly put their own stamp on it and took it in a new direction.
Anyway, the debate of where it came from first will hopefully continue for a long time yet but I thought we could finish up by looking at a couple of other genres and places slide Guitar found itself travelling to. Country Music is an obvious one. Still in its infancy in the early 1900s Country Music took to Hawaiin ideas quickly. The idea of placing the Guitar on your lap facing upwards evolved into Lap Steel Guitar. And you can’t get more Country than Lap Steel. And the slide stayed present in Blues as it went electric and then Rock Music evolved. (Apparently, even some Jazz players use the slide, but the less said about that the better). But the place that often gets overlooked, but is probably where slide is most popular outside of Blues Music, is Indian Classical Music. Yeah. Hindustani Slide Guitar is fully established and not going anywhere. The slide Guitar infiltrated the mysterious world of Raga at some time in the first half of the 20th century. And guess who brought it there? A Hawaiian. But that’s a whole other story…
Sources for this article:
wikipedia – slide guitar
by.arcadia.org – “the origin of blues slide guitar”
smithsonian magazine (saleema shah, 2019)
oxfordamerican – “that winesme moan” (Ian S. Port)
guitarnoise (Rick Payne)
documentrecords.com (Rick Payne)
yamaha.com
countryinstruments.com
premiereguitar.com – “secret world of hindustani slide”
blueschronicles2.com
fuelrocks.com
bandcamp.com – “a chant about the beauty of the moon” (album)
wilson quarterly – “hawaii’s unexpected role in american blues music”
nea.org – “the illegal overthrow of the hawaiian kingdom government”