History
Playing a guitar laid flat and using a bar to slide up and down the strings has been common in the Hawaiian Islands for well over a century. The exact beginnings are lost in the mists of time but it gained popularity as a playing style in America in the post war years when servicemen returning from stations in the pacific brought this "new" idea with them.
Hawaiian guitar became something of a craze for a while. This encouraged manufacturers like Hermann C. Weissenborn and Chris J. Knutsen to develop their own instruments for the growing market. It is the surviving examples of these instruments that are the most coveted by players and that provide the most inspiration to current manufacturers.
Using a slide on a regular guitar has been documented from the early days of the blues. The composer W. C. Handy, whilst waiting at a train station in Mississippi, witnessed an unknown player who left a lasting impression on him. "As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable."
Read more about this topic: Lap Slide Guitar
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)