the Hawaiian steel/ blues slide guitar connection

[John Troutman]

Hi everyone,

Several years ago I posted on the SGF, asking folks for their input in regard to the relationship between the Hawaiian steel guitar and the delta blues slide guitar. The input was helpful and got me on the road to my current book project on the Hawaiian steel guitar. Now, many years and several research trips later, I am still working on the book, but next month a journal called _Southern Cultures_ will publish my essay on this steel/slide question.

Normally, access to this journal requires either a personal subscription or access to a university library database. However, for those who have no access to _Southern Cultures_ (it is an awesome publication, by the way), I have posted a pdf version of the forthcoming article on my website (http://johntroutman.weebly.com). You will find reference to the article on the home page-- it is called "Steelin' the Slide: Hawaiʻi and the Birth of the Blues Guitar." Click on that title, then click on the title again, when it opens up on the next page (next to the photo of Joseph Kekuku. Note-- it takes a little while to download).

I thought some here might be interested in the essay, even if it fuels debate rather than quiets it. I would love to hear your thoughts. I also thought I should share with our forum, finally, my own response to an old question that I posed here, many years ago.

Thanks to Bobby and to everyone else for our forum!! The forum itself has turned into a fantastic research database and collection of resources, all to its own.

John Troutman
**my website: http://johntroutman.weebly.com

p.s. Stay tuned for more information on a March 23rd, 2013, Steel Guitar Symposium in Carrboro, North Carolina, featuring an evening concert with Chris Scruggs, Cindy Cashdollar, and Bill Kirchen. I was invited to give a talk on the history of the instrument that afternoon as well, and I will even get to host a Q&A with Cindy and Bill!!

http://artscenterlive.org/event/performance/2103

[Jerome Hawkes]

p.s. Stay tuned for more information on a March 23rd, 2013, Steel Guitar Symposium in Carrboro, North Carolina, featuring an evening concert with Chris Scruggs, Cindy Cashdollar, and Bill Kirchen. I was invited to give a talk on the history of the instrument that afternoon as well, and I will even get to host a Q&A with Cindy and Bill!!

http://artscenterlive.org/event/performance/2103

got my tix for this last week - i dont know if I'll be there all day for the seminar though.

[John Troutman]

Great Jerome! Well, you'll be there for the best part, at least!

[Mike Anderson]

John, after a cursory read I believe everything you say makes perfect sense. The importance of the influence of Hawaiian music in America has IMO never been properly explained and accepted, and it is long overdue.

[James Nottage]

A substantial piece of work, strong scholarship, great interpretation, the kind of inquiry we really need. Congratulations. Solidly informs work that I have been doing on the spread of Hawaiian music in Wyoming, Montana, and Utah.

I've sent you a private message

James Nottage

[John Troutman]

Mike and James-
Thank you so much for the kind words!! I really appreciate that you checked it out. Thank you!
John

[David Mason]

Hawaiian music's influence on the blues is interesting, but I have to quarrel with your "origins of Hawaiian music" story. I know it's a matter of great Hawaiian national pride to believe that Joseph Kekuku invented the whole idea, as you even say it:

Kekuku... ...reported that it took him about seven years to perfect this new style as he adapted it to suit a number of Hawaiian and western musical traditions. He fabricated fingerpicks, a steel bar and a higher nut that he placed under the strings to raise them away from the fretboard.

And all of this sprung full-blown from the mind of a native adolescent, with no known history of instrument design or manufacture, no access to a library, no apparent mentors....

In India, there is an instrument variously called the Gottuvadhyam, vichitra vina, chitra vina (or veena) depending on which part of India you reference. It's got three to six playing strings laid flat, and is variously "stopped" with a glass ball, a metal or wood rod. In one of "those things" the first video you may pull up on YouTube shows a gentleman playing this ancient Indian instrument with what looks exactly like a piece of PVC plastic pipe!

If you are planning on publishing this piece in current form, it's going to blow up on you, as Indians also have some national pride, and they also have... strings laid flat, metal fingerpicks, a raised nut, the metal bar... and it's all documented back at least 150 years before a little peasant boy spontaneously invented every aspect of a brand new instrument? Yikes. I'm not pointing this stuff out because I like to pick fights with strangers, it's just that you seem to have bought into the Hawaiian national myth machine, nut, bar and fingerpicks....

At the very, very least, you have to acknowledge the possibility that an extraordinarily-intelligent young boy heard an Indian sailor wailing away on his version of the blues, and this boy was able to extrapolate from one stringed instrument to the next. By the way - the microtonal aspects of the blues have been picked up and assimilated very, very well by Indian musicians such as slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya and sitarist Indrajit Bannerjee - they almost sound as though they've already known them for a few centuries! There's at least another book in there.

[Dennis Russell]

Nice job, John. A couple of years ago, I wrote a paper for a graduate class in ethnomusicology at UC Santa Barbara tracing the influence of Hawaiian music in early Country music. I made some similar points that you have: that Hawaiian music was popular throughout the country, mainly due to traveling vaudeville shows with Hawaiian musicians; that regional professional musicians were learning Hawaiian music and emulating manners of playing due to that popularity and those instruments and manners of playing, along with others, then became assimilated into a developing country music genre.
Glad to see there are some other people who are recognizing the popularity of Hawaiian music throughout America in the early 20th century, and are entertaining some alternative narratives than most popular music history books are currently presenting.

[John Troutman]

David-- I greatly appreciate you reading the piece and weighing in on the Kekuku vs. Davion issue. And I appreciate the respectful manner in which you disagreed with the Kekuku claim. My hope with this particular piece, of course, is that informed readers who support the Davion claim will not dismiss the main thrust of this essay-the establishment of the relationship between the Hawaiian guitar and the development of the blues slide technique in the South. I did not go into the varying origin stories of the technique in Hawaiʻi due to space constraints (I mentioned that these competing claims exist in footnote 7), and also because it was beyond the scope of the essay , but rest assured that these competing claims are taken up at great length in my manuscript.

I do not want to go too far into this on this post, but suffice to say that, when I began my research on this topic in earnest, about seven years ago, I was totally with you on the Davion position-- that Davion (or someone else from India, likely a sailor) introduced the gōttuvādhyam to the islanders. This theory only bolsters the conception that Honolulu was one of the most significant crossroads in the world in the mid-19th century, and a direct connection to India would only further the idea that the Hawaiian guitar is a truly trans-continental, transglobal instrument.

We must acknowledge at the outset of all of this, of course, that speculation plays a key role in any position we take on the origins of the instrument. We have a great deal of evidence that we can sift through, but at the same time, there is a great deal that we do not know, and will likely never know, with any degree of certainty. In addition, there are as many people, if not more, just as invested in disputing the origin of the Hawaiian guitar in Hawaiʻi, as there are people invested in defending that claim. So this is complex issue and people take positions for a variety of reasons (just as many, for decades, dismissed the idea that Hawaiians played a role in the development of the blues slide guitar).

But like I said, I was with you and many other on the Davion claim, from the get go. Two accounts exist that mention a Gabriel Davion-- one is a fleeting reference to him, made in 1932, and the other is the story that we all know of him, delivered once over the radio by Charles E. King, the prominent Hawaiian composer, in 1938. Census records do not do much for us on searching for Davion. There is one Davion listed in the 1910 census that could fit our Davion's age, but the census lists him as coming from South Africa, not India. Of course, census records are often incorrect, and our Davion may have passed away before the first U.S. censuses were conducted in the islands, or moved away or dodged them.

But the King account is the one and only account in the historical record, at least, that provides us with the Davion claim-- he described Davion as an Indian boy who was kidnapped by a sea captain and brought to Hawaiʻi, where he then showed this "new" method of playing the guitar, and Kekuku took it with him to the continent.

This is a thrilling story and makes perfect sense, given that people had been running objects over strings to make music in India for over a thousand years. I was invested in that connection, but as I delved deeper into the project, I became less convinced of such an influence on Kekuku, or any other islanders.

I won't dive too far into it here, but after spending months at a time in the archives, I developed several concerns with King's claim, or even the claim that these Indian instruments were introduced to the islands. Here are a couple of the concerns (I will save the others for the broader discussion in the book).

1) When Kekuku began showcasing the Hawaiian steel guitar, he generated a lot of interest in the press-- a LOT. This was a method of playing guitar that, it seems, NO ONE had seen before. So the press took to it, and tried desperately to describe it. But after poring over Hawaiian and continental newspapers and newspaper databases, NO articles referencing objects on guitar strings turn up, anywhere, before it is Kekuku himself who is performing. If Davion was indeed playing in this manner, on any object, let alone the guitar, in the islands, then I believe something either in the press, or in additional reminiscences or other stories coming from the islands, would have turned up.

2) The gōttuvādhyam is a classical Indian instrument. After speaking with scholars of Hindustani music and reading their publications, it is clear that this instrument, and its relatives, existed by the 19th century only in the most elite of families. As Australian Hindustani music scholar Adrien McNeil put it, "the gottuvadyam or vichitra vina were both classical instruments in limited circulation and unlikely to be heard outside of the circumscribed environments of the princely courts or the homes of very wealthy patrons." It is quite unlikely that a stowaway or kidnapped child, or sailor from India, would have ever seen or heard those instruments. Of course, the possibility is there, for sure. But it seems less than likely.

3) I found an earlier discussion of the origins of the Hawaiian steel guitar by the same Charles E. King, from 1925, when he clearly attributed the development of the steel guitar to... Kekuku. And Kekuku alone-- he does not mention Davion or anyone else. So for some reason, I am not sure why, he had changed his story by the late 1930s, after Kekuku had passed away. This was a few years after someone in a hawaiian newspaper in 1932 mentioned a Gabriel Davion playing steel guitar at one of Kalākaua's celebrations (this is that 2nd, of 2, mentions anywhere of a musician named Davion existing). No other accounts of anyone playing in this manner at Kalākaua's coronation or birthday celebrations exist. My guess, and it's only a guess, is that King read that account, and then, by 1938, he had convinced himself of its truth. I could be wrong, of course.

I found much to support the Kekuku claim, including a couple of of wonderful family accounts of the origin, but I will save all of that for the book But suffice to say, after doing the research, I think it is indeed entirely plausible and likely that yes, Kekuku, an adolescent working in the machine shop of his school (actually a well-endowed school-- the Kamehameha School for Boys), developed the technology required to competently perform the steel guitar technique on converted Spanish guitars.

Sheer speculation and additional challenges remain to the Kekuku claim, of course, Many individual accounts link Kekuku to the origins of the instrument, but many of these differ. The railroad spike or railroad stories, I think, are completely made up--even Kekuku mentions the railroad story once or twice later on in his career, and I think he was romanticizing the story by that point. On top of this, yes, people have been running objects on strings everywhere, forever. But my position is that no one had yet developed a competent and translatable version of this technique on Spanish guitars until Kekuku came along.

So for many of us, I think it depends on what you consider the "origin" of the steel guitar technique. Is the origin the emerging curiosity of humans, thousands of years ago, to make music with gut strings? Or does it begin with the first melodic development of this practice on Spanish guitars? My guess is that many of us will differ on this question. But as a historian, I have to collect all of the available evidence and then weigh in, and although I began with Davion, I have since become less convinced of this claim, or of the claim that others from India introduced the concept. If anything, I think Kekuku was trying to model a guitar sound off of the violin, and this is the technique he came up with to do that.

But I am totally with you in that the Davion claim remains possible; it is obviously tantalizing and makes for a great story. I weigh it out in the book, as Lorene Ruymar did in her wonderful source book on the history of the instrument. My hope is that folks on all sides of the question will consider my treatment of it balanced and well-established.

The case that I make for the Hawaiian influence on the blues slide guitar, likewise, will never be settled, and people are certainly, deeply and personally invested in that question as well. But I have had a great time digging up these questions again and considering them in light of new evidence and new interests in the history of our instrument! Thank you again for checking out the piece and weighing in!

[John Troutman]

Dennis- thank you for reading the piece, and that sounds like an awesome grad paper! I would love to check it out if you'd like to share. I will tackle the early country connection in the book as well, and as you know, there is much to say about that. A music historian, Anthony Lis, is also producing some wonderful scholarship on the connection that you are discussing (his essays in Basil's _Aloha Dream_ publication are awesome). A couple of scholars recently completed PhD dissertations on the pedal steel as well. So we are seeing a wave of scholarly interest in the steel guitar right now-- it is very exciting, and I am sure it will provide us with much more food for thought on its history!

[David Mason]

Well, I appreciate the respectful manner, too! And you have certainly researched it further than I had known, especially the part about Kekuku's schooling and access to a machine shop. I just feel that most inventions don't happen spontaneously in a vacuum - I suppose at heart this goes to the classic "Great Man vs. Man of the Times" debate. And as time goes by it certainly seems as though people of various origins did a whole lot more traveling than was previously thought, and there was a lot of impregnating going on (of both culture and of the other kind ).

Now hopefully people aren't going to throw rocks and stuff*, but when I googled "Davion slide guitar Hawaiian" this site just flatly said this:

The Chitravina is one of the most exquisite musical instruments in the world today. Also referred to as Gotuvadyam, it is a 21-stringed fretless Indian lute, quite similar in its playing technique to the Vichitraveena of North India. It is also one of the oldest instruments in the world, enjoying a history of nearly 2000 years. It is the forerunner of many instruments like the fretted veena and is also recognised (in the West) as the prototype of the Hawaiian Guitar. It has also been referred to, at various times, as Mahanataka veena and Hanumad veena.

- http://www.chitravinaganesh.com/

So you may have a bit of Indian national pride to contend with, at least. By the time young Joseph, umm, didn't fall over a railroad spike, there were sailors from all over the world - all over the world. "Going off to sea" was a quite standard way to escape legal unpleasantries at home, so we can be sure that there were a few tellers of tall tales on ships, as well.

*(But I'd stay out of Mumbai for a while if I were you...)

[John Troutman]

Hey David,

Awesome post! And I am with you on "Great Man vs Man of the Times" debate, for sure-- I am a social historian, and generously speaking, social history 101 teaches that behind any of these "great men," you have a MUCH more complicated context that is usually, profoundly more interesting. Ultimately, I would like to position Kekuku somewhere in between both ends of that spectrum, but your points demonstrate that I need to really think through how I present this argument, and that I should take great care in acknowledging all of these potential influences in the development of the instrument.

And you are right, it is not only the blues mafia I will have to watch out for-- I might have the raga mafia on my back as well!

John

[Mike Anderson]

The interesting thing about this sort of debate is that there is a limit to the extent we can apply principles of scholarship; research can (and may have) just run into a wall where we simply don't have enough provable historical information to determine anything for certain.

I side with the Hawaiian origin for two reasons:

1. the Davion story as we know postdates the factual information we have about Kekuku; I also agree that it's highly unlikely that Davion could have brought the (rather unwieldy, high-caste/expensive) Gottuvadyam along as a young sailor, or that he would have been a student of it (or if he was that he would have shared his technique with non-Indians - in fact to do so would go entirely against the grain of how he would have learned classical music in India, with years of apprenticeship under a guru etc.)

2. I have that prickly feeling I always get (which has nothing to do with scholarship in any way) during debates of this nature: that someone was trying to take something (more) away from the Hawaiians. Not you David, you are clearly very open and respectful about this matter - but someone, somewhere had to be thinking along the lines of "those Hawaiians - they couldn't have come up with something that original/creative/radical!" And that thinking would have originated from the popular, bigoted perception of Polynesians as slothful, indolent, primitive people.

Just sayin'.

[Stephen Abruzzo]

Very interesting scholastic endeavor. I never realized that the Hawaiians were so ingrained in The South.

As to Kekuku and whether or not a 16 yr old kid could have "discovered" the fun of sliding a steel object over a set of string.....WHY NOT?

History is full of precocious youngsters who perform at extraordinarily high levels despite their age. Look no further than sports for proof of that. Intuitiveness and "gut-instincts" can't be taught and obviously he had a great "ear" for what worked and how to make it work.

[Don Kona Woods]

The Indian connection to steel guitar in Hawaii never made sense to me and the research noted here gives more credence to my thoughts .

As opposed to the Indian connection, I believe that the Mexican and Portuguese connections would make more sense in being an part of the influence in developing the Hawaiian steel guitar. In the 1800's, the Mexican cowboys (paniolos) were introducing string instruments such as the guitar and even falsetto singing, while Portuguese immigrants brought the ukulele-like braguinha.

The interesting thing about this sort of debate is that there is a limit to the extent we can apply principles of scholarship; research can (and may have) just run into a wall where we simply don't have enough provable historical information to determine anything for certain.

Mike makes a very good point because credible historical analysis comes primarily through first hand witnesses reporting on the matter. Second hand or hearsay reports can be helpful information, but the results can be very biased and unreliable.

John, I am remembering that I helped you in some way a few years ago when you were beginning your research, but it slips my mind as to how I helped or what I did. This must mean that is was not significant.

I am enjoying the discussion here. Keep it going!

Aloha,
Don

[Jeff Au Hoy]

Thank you, John, for opening my eyes to this fascinating topic!

I always bring up the gōttuvādhyam as the "grain of salt" when telling the Kekuku story.

Joseph Kekuku's high school (Kamehameha, founded 1887) is a long standing rival to my alma mater (Punahou, founded 1841). While I'm certain we had at least two or three books by statehood in 1959, I can't say as much for them...

[Lev Liberman]

There is one Davion listed in the 1910 census that could fit our Davion's age, but the census lists him as coming from South Africa, not India.

From Wikipedia: "There are more than 1 million Indians in South Africa, most of whom are descended from indentured labourers who were brought into the country by the British from India in the mid-19th century... Indian South Africans form the largest grouping of people of Indian descent born outside India."

[John Troutman]

Lev-- wow--that's why I love this forum! I had assumed our Gabriel Davion from India had moved on from the islands by the time the census rolled around in 1900, but this might be the guy! I thought about the Empire connection, but had not been aware of the history of indenture there. Very cool-- The more we can learn about the Davion figure, the better! I will keep poking around-- I found a few tax records and court cases for one of the Davions, but more information might turn up...

Don-- I think you helped me with a question dealing with a more recent era, but I will have to go back and look in my folders.

Thanks for the continued feedback, everyone! Really glad to see the interest here!

John

[Jan Viljoen]

I found this thread very interesting and I can only hope that every angle will be investigated.

Please check out also this link.

http://www.dancingcat.com/shorthist.php

Steel on!

[Mike Anderson]

I think that anyone seeking insight into the likelihood of Davion casually sharing his Gottuvadyam technique (presupposing he had any) with Hawaiians should read this. Your local library might have it, that's how I found it.

Does this look or sound like steel guitar to you? Not to me. The fact that there are instruments in this world that are played with a vaguely similar technique, or to achieve a vaguely similar effect, does not indicate they are related in any way - especially when separated by thousands of miles of distance and hundreds of years between origins. This obviously doesn't apply to John's theory, since it is well known that Hawaiian musicians were exerting a huge influence on American music at the time in question.

[David Mason]

"There are more than 1 million Indians in South Africa, most of whom are descended from indentured labourers who were brought into the country by the British from India in the mid-19th century... Indian South Africans form the largest grouping of people of Indian descent born outside India."

And when I read this, my fiction-loving mind immediately thought of Davion as a an escaped slave... it's polite to call it "indentured servitude" because it was very common for a poor family to sell their sons and daughters to a rich person, with the understanding that it was for a specific time period, usually seven years. But from the point of view of the sons and daughters... hmm. And IF Davion had been sold to a wealthy family who rocked the gottuvadyam and he had escaped and hopped a ship to Hawaii, even though he didn't take the gottuvadyam, he could've picked up a guitar and said "Hmmm..." himself. He didn't necessarily have to be a big performer onstage to be doing it, the notion of musicians being a specialized group who performed in concerts for non-musicians seems sort of un-Hawaiian too.

And I can PROVE it! With the... the... ummm.... Well, let me get back to you on that. As Mr. Troutman has already alluded to the "blues mafia", depending on the circulation and popularity of his article and book, he may run into a much bigger tornado from the other end of things. Although a large number of black people had abandoned "blues" in the 50's and 60's, the notion of what jazz music IS and what it SHOULD BE got all tied up in the black nationalism and black power movements in the 1960's. It's a whole 'nother book; it suffices to say that Miles Davis got criticized for playing with white people, and Jimi Hendrix actually got threatened for playing "too white."

A good deal of this has carried over to modern times, though pretty specifically to jazz music. Influential critic Stanley Crouch and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis have gone as far as saying jazz is black music, and white people can only take from it, not add to it. Whether they would dig in to the idea that blues music was something other than straight from Africa and had some Hawaiian "help", well, there's one way to find out! I do know there's been a steady pilgrimage of American blues musicians over to Africa, Mali in particular. Where they take out their guitar, twank a bit with the locals, thereby proving that blues came from Africa. The last one over that I know of was lily-white, red-headed, freckly Bonnie Raitt, which certainly proves something or another.

[John Billings]

Great thread! Looking forward to the book. But I still wonder,,,, who was the first Blues guy to run a rib bone or jack knife down his guitar strings? And when did he do it? Early on, there was no radio. How many rural Blacks actually went to the traveling shows? That would be an expense that very few could afford. They were fairly isolated too.
In this thread, the Hawaiian conversation has dominated, with little being said about the Blues side of the equation.

[John Troutman]

Hey John--

Those are good questions, and I think it is important not to understate the unique and uber-creative developments by African Americans in their slide techniques in the ʻ20s and ʻ30s. And before that, I imagine a lot of people experimented with various objects on strings, as people have done all over the world for millennia. But I still get the sense, at least in terms of what we can actually study (and find!) in the historical record, that Kekuku was the first to really spend time developing a competent technique for doing this on the guitar. That remains my working theory, at least. Once he showcased the style to others, and they learned that they could actually make pleasant sounds in this manner on the guitar--less a novelty than an actual, translatable style--then folks, beginning in Hawaiʻi, then spreading around the world like wildfire, took off with it. The Davion claim remains intriguing to me, but based upon the existent historical evidence, which is all I can ultimately go on as a historian, it is much more speculative than anything else. It is possible, certainly, but the eye-witness accounts surrounding Kekuku's origination and development of the technique simply hold more water for me in the end. Of this claim, I have actually identified a fairly extensive amount of evidence, and the more I dig, the more confident I feel about it.

As for the traveling shows, it seems that the poorest folks (white and black alike) in the South encountered these musicians in free performances--in parades and parks-- that were meant to attract paying customers to the evening shows. As I mentioned in the article, WC Handy described the typical strategy for entertainers to parade along Main Street to drum up the business in the 1890s, where EVERYONE saw them--whites AND people of color. However, it also seems clear that the evening shows attracted paying white AND black customers, despite the fact that the seats (and, occasionally, the individual performances) were segregated (the color of money, in this case, shaped the implementation of Jim Crow in traveling entertainments).

Again, I've really enjoyed everyoneʻs comments so far-- they are helpful and exciting for me to read--

John

[John Billings]

John,
Just searched this out. From the book on Blues , edited by Jas Obrecht, "Rollin' and Tumblin.'

"Bandleader W.C Handy, the self-proclaimed "Father of the Blues," heard this form of music for the first time in 1903, when he was awakened in the Delta's Tutwiler train station by a ragged slide guitarist."

[John Troutman]

Hi John--
Yes indeed. I discuss Handy's observation in the essay.
Thanks!
John