Instruments
Guitar (Steel)
The steel guitar, still the sonic emblem of American country music, has origins deep in the mists of American popular culture. In its modern form it is an electric guitar mounted crosswise in front of the player on four legs, with pedals (and knee-operated levers) that retune the instrument by changing the available length of the string. The "steel" involved is a steel bar pulled across the strings to produce sliding pitches. The predecessor to this "pedal steel" was an acoustic instrument held on the lap and played the same way; the "lap steel" was common in country music of the 1920s and 1930s. Still played, it may likewise be referred to simply as a steel guitar. The electric instrument was pioneered by Texas western-swing guitarists Bob Dunn and Leon McAuliffe in the mid-1930s. All steel guitars trace their lineages to Hawaii, where the guitar was introduced by Mexican or Portuguese immigrants in the 1830s. The innvation of playing the guitar with a steel bar (originally a knife or even a comb) is popularly credited to a single Hawaiian player, Joseph Kekuku. An American craze for Hawaiian guitar music flourished in the early years of the twentieth century; country players, as they so often do, rescued a sound in decline and put it to new uses.