Originally published in The History of Rock, 1983

Probably no other instrument in the world is as closely associated with country music as the pedal steel guitar. Yet its roots are found not in some rural hamlet in the Southern reaches of America, but in an exotic, hybrid Polynesian culture located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The steel guitar’s most venerable ancestor was born in the Hawaii of a century past, after the guitar had been introduced to the islands by Mexican and Portuguese cowboys who came following a cattle boom. According to legend, a man named Joseph Kekuku one day happened to drop his comb across his guitar’s strings, becoming enchanted with the slithering, slinky sound it made. By 1894, he was giving impromptu concerts accompanied by his cousin Sam on violin and, by the turn of the century, had begun to move past mere novelty into serious study of the instrument. He designed a steel bar, held in the left hand and moved across the strings, to make the sound brighter and cleaner.

The instrument was imported to the United States on the wave of a Hawaiian craze that washed over American shores after the First World War. Coinciding with the growing popularity of phonograph records, such “hula blues” masters as Sol Hoopii, Frank Ferara, and Roy Smeck were soon making the “lap” guitar a fashionable instrument.

Mongrel Music

Related somewhat to the bottleneck style, the Hawaiian legacy was picked up by the mongrel music known as Western swing in the ’30s. Bob Dunn, of Fort Worth, Texas, became the first to apply electricity to the acoustic lap steel, and from there, such guitarists as Leon McAuliffe, Noel Boggs, and the legendary Joaquin Murphy (who would often walk off stage in mid-song if he was somehow dissatisfied) set the perimeters of the new style.

The problem with the steel was the bar, which often forced players into strange tunings and awkward “slants” to obtain some degree of musical sophistication. This would eventually result in the addition of pedals to the instrument, whose function would be the same as placing fingers on a guitar neck. The ’40s saw many players attempting to bridge this technical gap, from Herb Remington—whose “Remington Ride” is an acknowledged steel classic—through the pure-toned Jerry Byrd, to Speedy West, the Jimi Hendrix of steel, whose bar crashes and wild swoops created sounds that remain unique decades later.

All of the above used some form of pedal guitar, but it wasn’t until 1954 that the steel guitar entered widespread use. With Bud Isaacs providing support for singer Webb Pierce, a song called “Slowly” captured the imagination of country hit parades everywhere, and the “crying” sound of a steel soon became de rigueur on every Nashville session.

The instrument was growing in sophistication as well. Buddy Emmons recorded Steel Guitar Jazz in 1963, backed by a jazz quartet. For those who had thought the steel was confined to mere weeping, Emmons showed harmonic possibilities on a par with the broadest of keyboards. Top session man and producer Pete Drake took the instrument another step further when he employed a voice-box to make his steel “talk”—a move that resulted in the 1964 million-seller “Forever.”

Increasingly, steel musicians began to look past their own little world, intent on promoting the concept of pedal steel to outside listeners and players. Dobroist Shot Jackson and Buddy Emmons teamed up early on to design the Sho-Bud guitar, thereafter a perennial favorite. Others, like the tireless Jeff Newman, began to teach the steel by means of mail-order courses, with play-along cassettes.

Steel Sweethearts

The annual high point of this activity comes during Labor Day weekend every year, when pedal steel guitarists and fans meet in St. Louis to pay homage to their instrument.

With all this seeming versatility, it seems strange that the instrument has continued to be so resolutely identified with country music. Early country-oriented rock ‘n’ roll—Bill Haley and the Comets, Sid King and the Five Strings—did feature large helpings of steel, but the attraction of the easily-mastered orthodox guitar probably discouraged many would-be steelers. The instrument, with its pedal choices, knee levers, different tunings, and usual 10 strings per neck requires a degree of expertise and concentration that conflicts with rock’s teenage impatience.

The country-rock boom of the late ’60s and early ’70s did produce some interesting hybrids, however. Rusty Young of Poco would slap effects devices galore on his stand-up steel, delighting audiences at both Fillmores, East and West. The Flying Burrito Brothers featured Sneaky Pete Kleinow, while the Byrds repaid the crossover by bringing Nashville regulars Lloyd Green and Jaydee Maness into the world of rock on their 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Clarence White, who played on the set, later devised a B-string bender for his Telecaster to simulate the steel’s sound.

In the ’80s, the steel guitar found itself at a crossroads. Long identified with country music, it was in real danger of becoming an easy stereotype: Nevertheless, the ornate richness of the steel texture is still capable of sweetening any form of sound. That it might become an instrument used worldwide was shown when it appeared within the Afrikan Beat Band of Nigeria’s King Sunny Ade in a neat trick of cultural transformation. It had been a long journey for the steel guitar from “Aloha Oe” to the backbone of country and beyond.

Watch: Everything You Wanted to Know About Pedal Steel [at youtube.com]

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