The argument that guitar has been around a lot longer, and that's why it's more diverse, is becoming hackneyed.
My argument was much more than it's been around a long time. Summarizing and perhaps expanding a bit:
1. It
has been around a
lot longer - various incarnations of the guitar have been around for many centuries
2. "It's portable, relatively cheap, most anybody can learn to make 'em sound semi-decent and loud, and then pretty easily use them to make major musical, social, cultural, and political statements."
3. This long buildup and the relative ease in getting one and being able to fairly quickly learn to play basic things on it has led to its adoption by a LOT of people. Many, many millions. Guitar constitutes a very large industry all by itself. Up until recently, a million guitars a year were being built. There has been a big storm in the industry when it became clear recently that it had settled down to about a half million a year.
4. And thus since the population of guitar players has been rapidly growing, of course it make sense to me that orders of magnitude more people playing it would lead to much more diversification in styles.
5. I'd add that the explosive growth of the guitar didn't start until the advent of rock and roll and the "Great Folk Scare" of the 1950s, but especially the Beatles and, in general, the British Invasion in the 1960s.
Up to electrification and Charlie Christian in the mid-late 1930s, there were not that many styles/contexts of music heavily using guitars:
1. European Renaissance/Baroque and "Classical" guitar, although it was present even before that
2. Spanish/Flamenco
3. Various types of ethnic folk music in Europe
4. Various types of folk music in the US, but especially country and blues
5. Rhythm guitar in early jazz
This is over hundreds of years.
Even with electrification, electric guitar was mostly jazz/pop of the day and blues into the 1950s. But once rock and roll hit, with large numbers of people taking up the instrument, the whole thing exploded. Rock and roll, country, blues, jazz, and folk increasingly embraced electric guitar. But it totally exploded with the Beatles and British invasion in the mid 1960s, psychedelic music and rockers embracing blues, jazz, and country elements. It wasn't just a movement of guitar - it was also a movement of different styles intertwining, with guitar at the center.
Pedal steel just didn't have the numbers to be this influential. And the instrument was really still in its infancy. Until at least the 70s, in most parts of the US, it was basically invisible. Even then, they were hard to get, expensive, and the ever-present "hard to play".
I really believe that it wasn't until the 1980s or 1990s and especially the advent of the internet and this forum that pedal steel has started to seriously grow in numbers. With this growth, I see lots more players diversifying stylistically. Sacred steel has been around for a long time, but it really only started becoming well known outside of its specific culture in the last 15-20 years since Robert Randolph exploded on the mainstream music scene.
I think there's been lots of diversification in the last 20 years. I expect there will be lots more in the future. But it's still a fairly niche, relatively hard to play instrument that I doubt will ever grow like guitar has in the last 60 years.
Trying to do a kick-off or a turn-around exactly the way Buddy Emmons did it can teach you much more than just the kick-off or the turn-around itself.
I totally agree. I often dissect and learn elements from other players. That is not what I meant by "slavishly" copying another player.
