The Steel Guitar ~ Julie Lence

 With the exception of the 50’s/60’s era rock-n-roll, I grew up on country music. Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Charlie Pride; Dad had his favorites, and it wasn’t long until his favorites became my favorites. To this day, I still remember how I couldn’t wrap my head around Mom telling me Loretta Lynn wasn’t married to Conway Twitty. I stared at her as though she was the crazy one and not me. Loretta sang with Conway (Dad had the albums) just like Tammy Wynette sang with George Jones (He had those albums, too). And since Tammy was married to George, my little girl mind reasoned Loretta was married to Conway. But Mom explained that just because a girl and a guy sang together didn’t mean they were married. I remember walking away completely dumbfounded, and still loving Dad’s albums. 

Fast forward a few years and my love of country music shifted to the background as disco and 70’s/80’s rock became my norm. I enjoyed school dances, and club hopping with friends hubby before ricocheting back to country music in the late 80’s. I don’t recall the reason for this, but blame George Strait (lol!). He’s my all-time favorite and all I can think is I must’ve heard him sing and realized how much I missed this type of music. Through George, I gravitated toward other artists, Vince Gill, Alan Jackson, Lorrie Morgan, to name a few. I became a concert junkie, collected cd’s, tee-shirts, and magnets, and through the madness, one thing stood firm in my admiration for the genre; the steel guitar. Every time George or someone else featured the steel guitar on a song, chills ran up and down my spine, which is probably why George’s, Amarilla By Morning, is one of my all-time favorite songs.  

Native to Hawaii from the late 19^th century, the steel guitar is a guitar in which one hand lightly presses a steel bar (or something similar that is hard) against the strings while the fingers on the other hand pluck the strings. The bar is the ‘steel’ part and is different from a regular guitar in that is has no frets, only markers that look like frets, and produces both a crying sound and deep vibrato imitating a human singing voice.    

Known as the Hawaiian guitar, from its shortening the length of the strings to change the pitch, the instrument became popular in the U.S. in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and saw a change in design to accommodate the shortening of the strings. The steel lap guitar came on scene, allowing the player to hold the instrument flat on his lap, but the guitar was not as loud as other instruments and often couldn't be heard at large performances. George Beauchamp and Adolf Rickenbacker changed that in 1934 with their invention of the pickup; picking up the sound of the strings through electrical signals which could be amplified.     

The earliest use of the steel guitar in country music is believed to have occurred in the 1920’s when cowboy movie actor Hoot Gibson brought Sol Ho ‘opi’ o to L.A. to perform in his band. From there, duo Darby and Tarleton featured the steel guitar on their recording of ‘Birmingham Jail’. The 1930’s ushered in the western swing, played on the newly electrified steel. The 1940’s saw Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, and others using the steel in their honky-tonk country music songs, with the pedal being perfected and added to the steel in 1948, creating a new sound for the guitar and for 1950's Nashville. Through the 1990's and even today, cowboys and cowgirls hit the dance floor Friday and Saturday nights to two-step or slow dance to the twang of a steel guitar, what I consider the true heart and soul of country music, alongside the fiddle.     

***A fret is a metal strip embedded in the neck's fretboard