| Author |
Topic: Rhino Collection: "Slide Guitar Classics" duh... |
Gerald Menke
From:
Stormville NY, USA
|
Posted 19 Nov 2004 9:44 am |
|
Hello,
I have been working on a more blues-influenced type of playing as of late, and to learn some more about this style picked up a copy of a Rhino compilation called “Slide Guitar Classics”. Maybe you know this collection. A few things/questions occurred to me while listening to it, reading the liner notes:
Did the bottleneck style precede the Hawaiian style, come after it or develop simultaneously? Did the Hawaiians know about the blues artists using bottleneck/metal slides, or as I have always understood it, did the two styles of playing develop independently? Or did the blues artists hear the Hawaiians?
The track credited to Chuck Berry “Deep Feeling” is OBVIOUSLY being “played” on a pedal steel, not a slide guitar.
The “rockin’ blues” tracks feature some slide playing with some of the worst intonation I had ever heard. The early stuff is also crazy out of tune, but I can forgive the guys who created the style, they must have left their TU-2s at home by mistake.
The compilation starts out pretty great, but by the time the white guys take over at the end (Johnny Winter, Allman Bros., Paul Butterfield), things have gotten pretty lame. Even the Ry Cooder track has chorused keyboards and bad Stratocaster sounds.
Anybody else know this compilation, have any reaction to it?
Gerald
|
|
|
 |
CrowBear Schmitt
From:
Ariege, - PairO'knees, - France
|
Posted 19 Nov 2004 10:09 am
|
|
i could be wrong, but i understood that the bottleneck or slide was influenced by the Hawaiian guitar & it's "new & unique" sound
the blacks in the rural south did'nt have $$$ to buy fancy instruments so they made their own
necessity was (& still is) the mother of invention
diddly bow, washtub bass, washboard, etc..
Grandpa Chuck "crazylegs" Berry plays a PSG in the movie "Hail Hail Rock & Roll"
on Blue feeling & Deep feeling i would think it's a lap or console steel
i could be wrong tho'....
No i have'nt heard that compilation[This message was edited by CrowBear Schmitt on 19 November 2004 at 10:10 AM.] |
|
|
|
John McGann
From:
Boston, Massachusetts, USA * R.I.P.
|
|
|
|
Rick Aiello
From:
Berryville, VA USA
|
Posted 19 Nov 2004 6:28 pm
|
|
Here an article written by Slack key Guitarist ... Keola Beamer ...
A Brief History of Slack Key Guitar
The pertainant info:
quote:
Hawaiian music has always enjoyed a reciprocal relationship with music from the American Mainland. Hawaiians began touring the U.S. during the early 1890s with acts such as the Royal Hawaiian Band, small string bands, steel guitarists and vocal ensembles. The 1912 Broadway show Bird of Paradise helped introduce Hawaiian music (although not slack key guitar) to the Mainland, as did Hawaiian shows at the big Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco in 1915. By the late teens, Hawaiian recordings were the biggest selling records in the U.S., especially acoustic steel guitar and vocal recordings.
Starting around 1912, blues slide guitarists and country & western steel guitar players became more and more influenced by the Hawaiian slack key guitar sound, due to increased recordings and tours by Hawaiian performers. The pedal steel guitar was developed from the Hawaiian steel guitar, which was invented in the 1880s. Some Hawaiian steel guitar tunings (and thus, some of the Mainland steel guitar tunings) evolved from slack key tunings, especially the G Major tuning for the dobro and lap steel guitar, and the C Major 6th tuning (similar to the C Mauna Loa tuning) for the pedal steel guitar. (Steel guitar means any guitar played with a metal bar, regardless of what material the guitar is made.)
In return, the hot jazz of the 1920s and 1930s, especially the great trumpeters Louis Armstrong and Bix Biderbocke, influenced the Hawaiian steel guitar players, most notably Sol Ho'opi'i (1902-1953).
From Bob Brozmans website ... Evolution of 12 bar blues ...
| Quote: |
| The oldest blues of 1890-1920 tends to have little or no change of chord harmony, simply melody over the grooving tonic chord. Gradually, from 1920-1940 blues musicians added more sophisticated Western harmonies. |
Seems as though the touring Hawaiians of the teens and '20s spread "that sound" 
------------------
Aiello's House of Gauss
My wife and I don't think alike. She donates money to the homeless and I donate money to the topless! ... R. Dangerfield
|
|
|
|
Michael Johnstone
From:
Sylmar,Ca. USA
|
Posted 21 Nov 2004 4:04 pm
|
|
Hawaiian steel played with a bar sliding on the strings can be traced from Hawaii back to Japan then further to China and finally to India. Blues guitar played with a slide can be traced back to Africa where hunting bows were played with a smooth stone - first as communication during a hunt and then later as a musical art form on bows modified w/hollow gourds as resonaters. Memories of this instrument were carried to America with the slaves who improvised a number of slide/stringed instruments (strings stretched between 2 nails on a front porch post played w/a bottle,etc)before finally playing African pentatonic scales w/a bottleneck on a 6-string guitar. Interestingly,the descendants of other slaves who ended up in Brazil still play a fairly intact version of the original African instrument. Of course,both these roots got blended in various ways around the beginning of the 20th century when people started playing blues on sqare neck National Tri-Cones w/modal tunings and things like that.
-MJ-[This message was edited by Michael Johnstone on 21 November 2004 at 04:06 PM.] |
|
|
|
Rick Aiello
From:
Berryville, VA USA
|
Posted 21 Nov 2004 6:19 pm
|
|
I hereby nominate Pythagoras
as the inventor of both the Hawaiian Steel Guitar and Delta Blues Slide Guitar ... 
quote:
The Pythagoreans supposedly found them by experimenting with a single string with a moveable bridge, and found these pleasant intervals could be expressed as the ratio of whole numbers.
|
|
|
|
Bobby Lee
From:
Cloverdale, California, USA
|
Posted 22 Nov 2004 3:03 pm
|
|
| The pythagorian scale is pretty hard to listen to. Ugly music! |
|
|
|
