Steel guitar
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Steel guitar is a type of guitar or the method of playing the instrument. Developed in Hawaii in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a steel guitar is usually positioned horizontally; strings are plucked with one hand, while the other hand changes the pitch of one or more strings with the use of a bar or slide called a steel (generally made of metal, but also of glass or other materials). The earliest use of an electrified steel guitar was first made in the early 1930s by Bob Dunn of Milton Brown and His Brownies, a western swing band from Fort Worth, Texas; the instrument was perfected in the mid to late 1930s by Fort Worth's Leon McAluff, who played for western swing band Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Nashville later picked up the use of the steel guitar in the early days of the late 1940s and early 1950s "Honky Tonk" country & western music with a number of fine steel guitarists backing names like Hank Williams, Lefty Frizell and Webb Pierce. The term steel guitar is often mistakenly used to describe any metal body resophonic guitar.
See also
- Slide guitar
- Resonator guitar
- Lap steel ukulele
- Lap slide guitar
- Lap steel guitar
- Pedal steel guitar
- Dobro
