by Margot Main

Hawaiian legend tells a story of how one day a school boy, Joseph Kekuku, picked up a bolt near the train track where he walked and was delighted with the sound it made as he slid it across his guitar strings.  He continued experimenting using the back of a knife blade.  Thus, the birth of the Hawaiian steel guitar.  The invention came to San Francisco in 1915 at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

Unlike a standard guitar, Hawaiian steel is played on a lap with strings raised above the freeboard and is tuned in one of many open tunings. Instead of the strings pressing into the fretboard a small piece of steel presses into them.  The metal bar "stops" the strings to produce notes. Free from restrictions by frets, a seasoned player can expand or constrict pitch, tone and other elements.

In 1932, the Rickenbacker company produced the first electric lap steels. The United States wholly embraced the Hawaiian guitar fad.  Electric steel guitars outsold regular guitars for quite a few years.  Country-Western musicians found the same legato as the fiddle but the electric steel heightened its range and force.  The Hawaiian guitar's sound of the Pacific Ocean's pulse and bountiful flora gave way to the new sound of tumbleweed scatting with the wind; drawling over expansive landscapes.

Around the same time, Truman Eason was taking lap steel lessons from a Hawaiian instructor in Philadelphia.  He taught his little brother, Willie, how to play.  Willy introduced the instrument to the Keith Dominion's congregation (one of three House of God churches that formed as a result of a legal order to divide Mary Magdalena Lewis Tate's, Church of the Living God.  Two of these Dominions, Keith and Jewel use the sacred pedal steel as the focal point for their services).  Willie Eason kept the Hawaiian and back country styles.  However, he also added the guitar's "talking" dimension.  Sliding steel across a string he would imitate gospel singers powerful bemoaning voices.  He taught his guitar skills to his younger brother-in-law, Henry Nelson.  Nelson, in turn, schooled his son, Aubrey Ghent.

Geoffrey Himes' essay, "A Joyful Noise," quotes Ghent: "We were encouraged not to play just for showmanship but to make sure it brought an edification for the congregation.  We were encouraged not be showoffs but to play in the spirit, so the playing lifted the spirit.  That was implanted with us."  This is the sacred steel's motivation and the basis for its sound.

In the late sixties to early seventies, Nashville's country guitarists set out to expand the steel guitar's harmonic capabilities.  They added foot pedals and knee levers so they could eliminate retuning each time they wanted to change keys.  The steel guitar's components expanded and now included in its construction: cabinet, changer (control bridge), endplates, keyhead, necks, pedal rods/pedals and pickups.  The pitch of one or more strings could now be controlled through the pedal.  Knee levers are commonly used with pedals raise or lower strings.  While the pedal is down, a tuning compensator allows the player to stay in tune; a quality many steel players embraced.  (www.steelguitar.com)

In 1971, prodigious teenager Chuck Campbell, heard pedal steel for the first time.  Around that same time, two legendary church steel players, Calvin Cook and Ted Beard, turned in their lap and table steel guitars to usher in the sacred pedal steel.  "Sacred Steel - Live" (Arhoolie records) offers live recordings of gospel songs as performed by several different sacred pedal steel guitar players.  Robert Randolph (23 yr. old New Jersey steel player who has recently been performing live sacred steel inspired guitar gigs with his band around Manhattan) plays on this CD as if he'd been strumming since he first learned how to talk.  In fact, he describes his custom built (by Jerry Fessenden) 13-string pedal steel guitar as his voice.  Randolph utilizes the extra string to broaden the bass notes in his "voice".  Also, generally, the pedal steel is tuned in E9th.  Randolph makes his sacred pedal steel his voiceprint by using a mix of tunings in E9th, E7th and C6th.  Thus, allowing to play and let the instrument sing in the spirit as previously quoted by Ghent.

Though playing in the House of God church taught Randolph the rudiments of skilled, respectful playing; when Randolph plays outside the church he gets into a groove and breaks into Jimi Hendrix and other rock tunes.  On a similar tangent, "Pedal Steel - Live" CD's song, "Celebration In Giving" opens with what could certainly be ZZ Top.

While the sacred pedal steel is used to augment a spiritual awakening; other types of music have found a home with the instrument as well.  Famed Country based musician, Buddy Emmons, "The World's Foremost Pedal Steel Guitarist" (as stated on his web site www.buddyemmons.com) took Speedy West's innovation of country pedal steel and created his own style - one that got him voted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 1991.

Jerry Garcia flirted with the pedal steel in seventies band, New Riders of the Purple Sage, before Buddy Cage came in.  Mark Van Allen currently plays pedal steel in "Blueground Undergrass" ("home of hick-hop", www.bluegroundundergrass.com).  Pink Floyd's Gilmore plays steel guitar on the album, "Meddles".  Funk hopping Junior Brown "combines the soul of country with the spirit of rock-n-roll" (as stated on his web site www.juniorbrown.com).  Brown may not have the edification qualities found in the sacred steel style; however, Brown's pedal steel does get people jumping into his luscious honky-tonk, boogie groove.

The pedal steel and steel guitars find home wherever they can produce sounds rooted in rich ethnic culture.  Sacred pedal steel style is held to a higher purpose and is rooted in the timeless idea of spiritual enlightenment through music.