The Steel Guitar Forum

Man that is FANTASTIC news!! I hope we can all see some pics and hear it on a recording after the restoration. You KNOW it's going to be a top notch. What a treasure!

Way cool !!

Due the amount of interest and buzz the instrument has generated I have recently been approached by a couple of serious guitar collectors and our national NZ museum.

The most logical place for it would be the national NZ museum.

I can understand why one might want it to be played, but it would seem important to protect it also.

Aloha,
Don

You know, just for a second I thought "wouldn't it be great if some world class lap steel player took this on as a project and brought it into the public eye?"

The obvious choice is Ben Harper and having Bill Asher take it back to playability is just freakin' awesome.

It's hard to imagine a better outcome. Ben Harper is such a class act, my bet is that this eventually winds up back in NZ as an excellent representation of the culture.

Just to clarify a couple of things ---- this lap steel is a guitar that has been carved with maori motifs !! The steel guitar has never been a part of maori culture or it's music (despite the polynesian connection) - although I'm sure it would fit in very nicely. So it has no cultural significance whatsoever, it's just a bit of eye candy that someone has made a very nice job of - although it's probably not that playable by the look of it.

Paddy Long wrote:The steel guitar has never been a part of maori culture or it's music (despite the polynesian connection) - although I'm sure it would fit in very nicely. So it has no cultural significance whatsoever, it's just a bit of eye candy that someone has made a very nice job of - although it's probably not that playable by the look of it.

I'm not sure what you're saying- That it is basically a tourist item? Or an art object that has no musical value? It looks like the person who made it must have been serious about making a good musical instrument. It seems to be better than those tourist souvineer wall-hanger guitars where the frets are in the wrong place, tuners can't be turned, etc.

Maori culture has actually survived pretty well, it did a lot better than Australian Aboriginal culture or the various Native American cultures.

I know some Maoris, there are plenty of them in Australia, and in New Zealand they're in no danger of vanishing. They've probably been the best at surviving and adapting while preserving their culture of any group of new world natives.

So a Maori decorated lap steel, while interesting and admirable, isn't a precious relic of a dying race. It's cool, but it isn't like you'd have any difficulty getting a living Maori craftsman to make something similar for you as a custom order. Could probably be done quite cheaply, and I'm sure there'd be plenty of Maori craftsmen who'd be interested in taking on the challenge.

Dan - Someone made the point that the lap steel had some cultural significance as an instrument played by Maori people (well thats the way it read to me) - and I was just pointing out that the steel guitar itself is not a maori cultural instrument !!!!

Dave - your quite right of course, maori have inter-married with us other New Zealanders of European heritage quite a bit and most maori have a fair bit of European blood so there is no chance they are likely to disappear !! your other points regarding the ease of having something done like that by a master carver is also dead right! first time I've seen it on a lap steel though

I am in agreement with Don Woods statement about it belonging in a museum.

Terry Wood