page_title: Steel guitar
section_title: Steel guitar in Blues music
hierarchical_section_title: Steel guitar / Steel guitar in Blues music
caption_attribution_description: English: Elvin Bishop's slide guitar; photo taken at Bishop's concert on July 3, 2010 at Boston's On The Beach
context_page_description: A steel guitar is any type of guitar that is played while moving a steel bar or similar hard object against the strings. The steel guitar is known for its portamento capabilities including deep vibratos and glissandos over wide intervals, emulating characteristics of the human singing voice.
  The hard object held against the strings is called a "steel" and is itself the origin of the name "steel guitar". This may be a solid bar held in the hand or a tubular object placed around the player's finger; it may go by many names, including "steel", "tone bar", "slide", “slide bar”, "bottleneck" and others. The strings are typically plucked by the fingers of the dominant hand while the tone bar is pressed against the strings and moved by the opposite hand. Creating music with a slide of some type has been traced back to primitive stringed instruments in African culture, but the modern instrument was concieved and popularized in Hawaii.
  A steel guitar might be a traditional guitar played in a horizontal position across the player's knees— a technique popularized by Joseph Kekuku in Hawaii in the 1890s. This type of playing is referred to as "Hawaiian style" or "lap steel".
context_section_description: Near the beginning of the twentieth century the bottleneck-style (slide guitar) was popularized by solo African-American blues artists. One of the first southern blues musicians to adapt the Hawaiian sound to the blues was Tampa Red, whose playing, says historian Gérard Herzhaft, "created a style that has unquestionably influenced all modern blues."  The Mississippi Delta was the home of Robert Johnson, Son House, Charlie Patton, and other blues pioneers, who prominently used a tubular slide on a finger. The first known recording of the bottleneck style was in 1923 by Sylvester Weaver, who recorded two instrumentals, "Guitar Blues" and "Guitar Rag". His song, "Guitar Rag", was adapted by Western swing pioneers Bob Wills and Leon McAuliffe in 1935 for the influential instrumental "Steel Guitar Rag".   Blues musicians played a conventional Spanish guitar as hybrid between the two types of guitars, using one finger inserted into a tubular slide or a bottleneck while using frets with the remaining fingers. This is known as "slide guitar" and the hard object against the strings in this case is called a "slide". Lap slide guitar is not a specific instrument, but a style of playing.
caption: Slide guitar played with slide on musician's little finger
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