After I retired from Disabled Sports USA (adaptive sports), my life’s work, I served on the Board of Directors for the Sacramento Blues Society who’s mission is to preserve and promote the blues an original American art form. I have listened to many great modern day blues artists and have written a few articles about the blues. I love slide guitar blues and want future generations to have the opportunity to know it's history and to experience this exquisite sound.
Slide guitar is often used in blues music and it is my favorite. It involves playing a guitar while holding a hard object (a slide) against the strings, creating glissando effects and deep vibratos that reflect characteristics of the human singing voice. The slide may be a metal or glass tube, such as the neck of a bottle. The term bottleneck was historically used to describe this type of playing. The strings are typically plucked (not strummed) while the slide is moved over the strings to change the pitch. Here is a modern-day player I have seen several times in recently.
Creating music with a slide has been traced back to primitive stringed instruments in Africa and also to the origin of the steel guitar in Hawaii. Near the beginning of the twentieth century, blues musicians in the Mississippi Delta popularized the bottleneck slide guitar style. The first recording of slide guitar was by Sylvester Weaver in 1923. Since the 1930s, performers including Robert Nighthawk, Earl Hooker, Elmore James, and Muddy Waters popularized slide guitar in electric blues and influenced later slide guitarists in rock music, including the Rolling Stones, Duane Allman, and Ry Cooder.
Elmore James was an American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter, and bandleader. Noted for his use of loud amplification and his stirring voice, James was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. His slide guitar technique earned him the nickname "King of the Slide Guitar".
Most players of blues slide guitar were from the southern US particularly the Mississippi Delta. Their music was likely from an African origin handed down to African-American sharecroppers who sang as they toiled in the fields. The earliest Delta blues musicians were largely solo singer-guitarists. W. C. Handy commented on the first time he heard slide guitar in 1903, when a blues player performed in a local train station: "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." Tampa Red was one of the first black musicians inspired by the Hawaiian guitarists of the beginning of the century. He adapted their sound to the blues. Tampa Red adopted the Hawaiian mode of playing longer melodies with the slide instead of playing short riffs as he had done previously.
Hudson Whittaker, known as Tampa Red, was an American Chicago blues musician. His distinctive single-string slide guitar style, songwriting and bottleneck technique influenced other Chicago blues guitarists such as Big Bill Broonzy, Robert Nighthawk, Muddy Waters, and Elmore James.
In the early twentieth century, steel guitar playing divided into two streams. The bottleneck-style was performed on a traditional Spanish guitar held flat against the body. The lap-style was performed on an instrument specifically designed or modified for the purpose of being played on the performer's lap. The bottleneck-style was typically associated with blues music and was popularized by African-American blues artists. The Mississippi Delta was the home of Robert Johnson, Son House, Charlie Patton, and other blues pioneers who prominently used the slide.
Edward James "Son" House Jr. was an American Delta blues singer and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing.
Earl Zebedee Hooker was a Chicago blues guitarist known for his slide guitar playing. Considered a "musician's musician", he performed with blues artists such as Sonny Boy Williamson II, Junior Wells, and John Lee Hooker and fronted his own bands.
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