Pedal Steel Guitar - History

History

The pedal steel guitar is the latest development in a story that started with the invention of a technique of playing used in Hawaii in the late 19th century, wherein the strings were not fretted in the normal manner by the left hand, but rather by sliding an object such as a comb or the back edge of a knife blade along the strings above the neck of the guitar. Several people have been credited with the innovation.

The Hawaiian style of playing was very popular in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. To increase the volume of the guitar, a resonator cone was added by the Dopyera Brothers to create the resophonic guitar (Dobro).

By the 30's, the hollow guitar body was abandoned for a flat slab of wood or metal and the addition of an electric pickup; this was the lap steel guitar. It was the first electric guitar to achieve commercial success. Several pioneering manufacturers of the electric guitar were first famous for their work on the then more popular electric steel guitar, among them Adolph Rickenbacker, Paul Bigsby and Leo Fender.

The limitations of chord shapes imposed by the use of the steel slide (or "tone bar") led to the addition of multiple necks, resulting in the console steel guitar. The Gibson Guitar Corporation used a system of pedals to change the tuning of the strings on one of their console steels beginning in 1940. This instrument, the Electraharp, had a cluster of pedals radiating from its left rear leg that operated similarly to the pedals on a harp. Alvino Rey was an early player of the Electraharp.

In about 1948, Paul Bigsby began making custom pedal steel guitars that featured pedals mounted to a rack between the front legs of the instrument. Speedy West got the second of Bigsby's creations, the first of his guitars to feature pedals, and used it extensively in his work with Jimmy Bryant. Zane Beck began adding knee levers to console steel guitars, and in 1952, added a set of four knee levers to Ray Noren's console steel. Beck's knee levers lowered the pitches of the strings they operated, which was an action opposite of what the pedals accomplished.

Around 1953, a console steel player named Bud Isaacs attached a pedal to one of the necks of his guitar. The function of the pedal was to change the pitch of two of the strings, whereby Isaacs would have two of the most common steel guitar tunings available on one neck. When he used this pedal to change his tuning while sustaining a chord during the recording of Webb Pierce's hit "Slowly," he touched off a revolution among steel guitarists. Isaacs used a Bigsby model for some time, however.

The steel guitar seems to have an unusually high number of mechanically inclined players, and a period of extensive tinkering followed Isaac's initial idea. Two of these tinkering musicians were Buddy Emmons and Jimmy Day, and their playing and mechanical innovations alike have done more for the development of the pedal steel guitar than any other contributors.

Emmons and Day split the function of Isaac's pedal into two separate pedals and added two strings to fill in the gaps in the E9 tuning, bringing the number of strings to ten. Although Emmons' and Day's setups do the same thing, Emmons and Day used the opposite of each other's pedals to raise the strings. To this day, when one buys a pedal steel, the manufacturer will ask whether the player wants an Emmons Setup or a Day Setup. Emmons incorporated a third pedal to his setup, based on a change Ralph Mooney had used on his instrument. Emmons joined forces in 1957 with another steel-playing machinist named Harold "Shot" Jackson and formed the Sho-Bud company, the first pedal steel guitar manufacturer. Sho-Bud guitars incorporated all the innovations that had taken place during the 1950s, including Emmons's third pedal, Beck's knee levers, and ten strings. The single-neck pedal steel guitar was now standardized with three pedals and (up to) four knee levers.

Both lap and pedal steel guitars were closely associated with the development of country music and Western swing. The pedal steel's liquid, yearning sound has begun in recent years to be coveted by many modern musicians, beginning in jazz and blues. In particular the rising popularity of alternative country has brought the instrument's beautiful sound to a much wider audience, and it has been used in many different musical genres. Jùjú music, a form from Nigeria, uses pedal steel extensively.

A Concerto for Pedal Steel Guitar and Orchestra has been written by Los Angeles composer Michael A. Levine. It was premiered on April 16, 2005, in a performance by the Nashville Chamber Orchestra, with Gary Morse (of Dierks Bentley's and Dwight Yoakam's bands) as soloist, and Paul Gambill conducting. The piece is believed to be the first concerto ever written for the solo steel guitar.