Word: instruments
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...full string section or as bright and bouncy as a banjo, that can be applied to the most complex jazz progressions as well as the rawest foot-stomping moonshine music. It's deeply sophisticated and wholly honky-tonk at the same time, and it's the ultimate American instrument...
...descendant of the lap steel, which came into vogue around 1915 with the Hawaiian music craze and gradually worked its way into the American mainstream via the music of Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Alvino Rey and Santo & Johnny ("Sleepwalk"). American manufacturers like Rickenbacker and Gibson began making instruments to suit this new style of music, essentially flat slabs of wood, metal or Bakelite outfitted with a pickup and six or eight strings set about an inch above a painted-on fretboard. A guitar in name only, the steel guitar is played seated, on one's lap or on detachable legs...
...Americans, as we know, are a tinkering breed, and in the early '50s a fellow named Bud Isaacs got the idea of hooking up a pedal that would pull a single string to a preset pitch while the instrument was being played, making the movement of the note part of the style. The first recording to feature this was 1953's "Slowly," by Webb Pierce, with Isaacs on steel, and the cat was out of the bag. More pedals were added, and then knee levers, which provided new ways to raise or lower the pitch of the strings...
...imploded by the virtuoso performance of Buddy Cage, the Riders' pedal steel player. Cage is the real deal, a country veteran who played on Anne Murray's first five albums; in contrast, the Dead's Jerry Garcia, the New Riders' original steel player, was a relative dilettante on the instrument who happened to play the steel break on Crosby, Stills & Nash's "Teach your Children." Garcia got by on his marvelous musicality rather than any real technique, and it's one of the enduring ironies that his performance on the CS&N smash, probably the best-known song to feature...
...consent with my father, I took off from college to ponder the relative merits of working in a piss factory and attending an Ivy League school. They oblige on a loan, and I tackle the beast. But my first dalliance is too much, too soon: The complexity of the instrument is more than I can handle, and I eventually abandon it to concentrate on the guitar, which I already play and can at least tune, and which offers more immediate applications...