The Steel Guitar Forum

"complicated antique"---I resemble that remark!!!

Won't let me read it without creating an account. No thank you.

Amazing article - nice shout out to some unique players.

Steve

Don R Brown wrote:Won't let me read it without creating an account. No thank you.

Me too!

You can open the article in incognito mode and read it if you don't have a subscription. I raad it and I cancelled my subscription a while ago.

maybe someone could copy/paste the article? a lot of us can't access it

Don R Brown wrote:Won't let me read it without creating an account. No thank you.

NYT subscribers have the ability to share non-paywall links.

Try this link:

click here

Mike, thank you for that link! An interesting write-up, mentions SGF and some familiar names here. That writer, for one, would say the world for pedal steel is expanding, not shrinking.

When the author used the word "lachrymal" it's possible they were using a thesaurus to find a fancier way to say "crying steel" or maybe they were talking about the many tears shed in frustration trying to learn how to play this thing.

Mike - thanks for the no-paywall link. There's another way to get past many paywalls - bring up the page and as soon as it starts to load, before the paywall comes up, click print (or CTRL P). Unless the paywall is basically instantaneous, it will capture the text. I use CutePDF to convert into a PDF file.

lachrymal textures

Of course, they can't use a normal word that is clear, unambiguous, and that most people understand. And it is a complete misunderstanding of the pedal steel to think that "lachrymal textures" are anything like the only use of pedal steel in traditional country music. But I think it would be laughable to think that most NYT writers would understand much of anything about traditional country music.

Look, I love it that people are pushing the boundaries. I am emphatically not just into traditional country music. But there's no 'resurrection'. Pedal steel has been here all these years. It hasn't been going anywhere, it ain't going anywhere, and it doesn't need to be saved by the NYT. I appreciate the exposure to The Intelligentsia, but I'm also a stickler for accuracy.

And most of us know how to post a photo. My dad (MIT Ph.D) at 90 probably woulda' have trouble figuring out how to post a photo.

Don R Brown wrote:Won't let me read it without creating an account. No thank you.

"Make up" a phony email address, add a password and save, and you're in!

(It appears they don't verify anything.)

At the end of the article is a link th a NY Times Spotify link called Pedal Steel featuring several of the players mentioned. It’s ambient for me but I enjoyed listening to it.

I liked the article. There's a whole bunch of people now (because of the massive subscriber size of NYT) that will see a pedal steel player in a band now and not think he/she is a keyboard player.

Maybe.

At first I was excited to think that Pedal Steel was getting exposure. Then I read the article. Twice he refers to the instrument as an "antique" and once as a "behemoth." He starts the article off leading one to believe that sacred steel is one of the new directions for the pedal steel. He makes it sound like nothing has been done on the instrument to date other than mashing pedals on country songs. Never giving a nod to the greats who are expert jazz, classical, and rock players. I may be over reacting, but in my mind I thought the article was a tad offensive to the instrument and the player community. Just my 2 cents.

Mark, as a daily reader of the NYT, I agree with you and will add that this isn’t the first article I have read in the Times that could have stood a little more research.

I read the article and got some chuckles out of some of the writers comments as well as his need to use a word no one would know without a dictionary just to prove he's a professional journalist (I guess? why else would he use that word?)
I read only the Wall Street Journal on a pretty regular basis and often run across things that are inaccurate or at least not well researched. Not trying to stand up for these writers but they have to crank out their work on a deadline which I'm sure doesn't leave them enough time to fully understand all that they are trying to relate.
Given that, I thought he did a decent job---hey he mentioned the SGF so for sure he spent some research time.
As to calling the PSG a behemoth, at 71 years old my Sho-Bud Professional gets my vote to be called a behemoth!!

The article says quite a bit about "ambient steel", and rightly so. Being a free-form musical style, it's probably the easiest type of music to play on the instrument, and that attracts a lot of newcomers that can't (or don't) want to spend the 10,000-25,000 hours it takes to be another Emmons, Green, or Chalker. I get the feeling that the ambient stylings are also more widely accepted by people who would wretch if they had to listen to country or country rock, where the instrument has found widest acceptance. Most of the professional music world considers us either low-brow, or just plain weird. Also, because no one has really and truly mastered the instrument (and it's likely that no one ever will), I think it will remain on the fringes, primarily because it's about the only musical instrument I can think of that's constantly changing and becoming more complex.