Want To Play The Guitar, But Don’t Have The Time Or Patience? (1985)

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• People forget that between the end of the war (and actually before the war, as early as the late twenties for acoustic types and 1936 or 1937 for the first electrics) and as late as 1960, "Hawaiian" guitar-played overhand with a slide, horizontally-was equally or more popular than the "Spanish" guitar, i.e. all guitars as we know them today, played underhand by fretting or occasionally with a bottleneck.

  By the early postwar period, every town and sizable urban neighborhood had a music store or two with a Steel Guitar Orchestra, the sole requirement for membership therein being the purchase of an instrument from said store. (There were also, believe it or not, accordion orchestras.) The lap steel vanished in a few years (hanging on longer in some places than others) starting about '60 or '62. But during its era, Fender, Gibson and Rickenbacker all made a lot of money from the lap and console steel business. In fact, the only reason so many Champ-sized amps from the period exist today is because most were sold with a steel guitar, which had zero cash value for decades. Many people insisted on selling them as a set and the buyer chucked the steel in the dumpster or pulled it down for parts.

  Steel guitaring has had a little renaissance, but not that much. Original lap steels are worth a little bit, a few, more.

  • I have done several sessions with this contemporary lap-steel player and he has always really impressed me - Joe Novelli. c.

    • There is a Steel Guitar convention in St. Louis every year and I've been to it a couple of times. Most of the focus is on pedal steel but there is always some interest in nonpedal steel. But steel guitar is about one tenth of one percent of interest in the guitar business today, whereas it was probably a third to a half the business in 1952.

      There are some really good players of nonpedal steel today, and a couple have become fairly well known. But the limitations of the instrument and the lack of "cool stage factor" in playing it-you have to sit down, or use awkward strapping and hunch over have caused it to pretty well go away in "the rock era".

      Even before "the rock era" the steel guitar was more storied than understood. Consider, for instance, that great Sinatra tune It Happened in Monterey :

      It happened in Monterey, a long time ago
      I met her in Monterey, in old Mexico
      Stars and steel guitars and luscious lips, as red as wine

      This was written in 1930, when Frankie was still Hat Pin Dolly's teenage tough guy-or he thought he was. Now, overhand steel guitaring is a Hawaiian invention, and there were no steel guitars or guitarists there until much, much later. All the guitars in Mexico in 1930 (outside, perhaps, upscale establishments in the Federal District) were gut string small parlor-like instruments played in the pre-Segovia Spanish style.

      Like the banjo and mandolin orchestras earlier and the accordion orchestras contemporaneous with the steel guitar ones, the (lap) steel guitar was used because masses of students could be trained to play simple things with it. The orchestras were intended as a social and entertainment outlet for the members, who were "paying to play", not for the pleasure of anyone listening. This model of music marketing made a lot of retailers a lot of money.

• Because they're using an off the shelf humbucker, the string spacing is going to be inadequate, for one thing.

  Building new lap steels now seems silly since the old ones are still mostly pretty cheap. I bought a nice Gibson seven string for $75 recently that only needed a nut and the wiring redone.