![]() Handy, who in 1903, while waiting for a train at Tutwiler railroad station in Mississippi, first heard an African-American musician “playing guitar with a knife as popularized by Hawaiian musicians”. The first written evidence of anybody hearing blues slide guitar is from the great composer, W.C. ![]() It is true that many of the early blues slide players learnt their first tunes on one string diddley bows, but whether that instrument actually does have its roots in Africa is not really known. (The term ‘Steel’ does not refer to the body of the guitar, but is the name of the tool used to play the instrument). All these elements were brought together in the latter part of the 19th century by the first Hawaiian guitarists and to cut a long story short, Hawaiian Steel Guitar was born. Indian musicians were using open tunings on their traditional instruments and in Hawaii, Mexican cowboys working the cattle farms played guitars in open Spanish tuning. There are other theories about how slide guitar may have started in Hawaii, but this to me is the most logical and believable. There is a story that in the 1890s an Indian musician, Davion, who played slide on a Gottuvadyam (Indian lap steel instrument) travelled to Hawaii to perform for the royal family, but due to a storm at sea, the ship he was travelling on was damaged and his instrument was destroyed, so he borrowed a guitar to do his concerts. In India there is evidence of polished stone slides being used on open tuned stringed instruments played lap-style like Hawaiian steel guitar, dating back thousands of years. ![]() There is however, a lot of evidence that supports the theory that slide guitar came into American culture from India via the Hawaiian Islands. ![]() Sliding an object up and down a string to change its pitch may have come into America from both Africa and Hawaii, but I believe the Hawaiian influence to be the most important. The diddley bow is a much smaller part of the story than it has been credited for. While there is unquestionable evidence that the roots of the blues are in African music, there is very little evidence, apart from stories told by explorers who went to West Africa, to support the theory that slide guitar comes from Africa. They were played by plucking the wire with one hand and sliding a bottle, a piece of metal or a bone up and down the string to change the pitch. These instruments (sometimes called a Jitterbug) are usually crude homemade one string children’s instruments made by fixing bailing wire between two screws on a board, or against the side of a shack for resonance. There is a whole school of thought that talks about the roots of blues slide guitar coming from various one string African diddley bow type instruments that arrived in America with the slaves. This first article is about the early pre-war players. For this series of articles I will focus on slide guitar in the blues. I am not saying that I know all the answers about its history, but I have formed some opinions and made some interesting discoveries along the way. I have been playing and studying the subject of slide guitar for nearly four decades and my journey of discovery has taken me from blues and rock into country, folk, western swing, bluegrass, Hawaiian, African, Indian, celtic and a few other places on the way. The story of slide guitar has been told many times, but because of partisan opinions and the fact that so much gets lost in the mists of time, there is some confusion about where it came from and how it became part of the African-American blues musicians repertoire in the early part of the 20th century. Written in 2012Īs I said in the British Slide Guitar article, I might well write a different article if I were writing it today. The History of Blues Slide Guitar - Part 1 - by Michael Messer.
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