The lap steel guitar, also called a Hawaiian guitar or lap slide guitar, is a type of steel guitar without pedals. It is usually played horizontally across the performer’s lap. Unlike a traditional acoustic guitar, where fingers press strings against frets, the pitch of a steel guitar is changed by pressing a smooth steel bar against the strings while plucking them with the other hand. The name "steel guitar" comes from this steel bar. Even though the instrument does not have frets, it has markers that look like them. Lap steels can look very different depending on whether they are acoustic or electric, but they all lack pedals, which sets them apart from pedal steel guitars.

The steel guitar originated in Hawaiʻi around 1885. It became popular after an Oahu teenager named Joseph Kekuku placed a traditional guitar across his lap and slid a piece of metal along the strings to change the pitch. This created a smooth, sliding sound called portamento, which became well-known in Hawaiʻi. During the first half of the twentieth century, American music fans became fascinated with Hawaiian music, which became a popular trend. Americans began calling the instrument a "Hawaiian guitar" and the horizontal playing style "Hawaiian style." In the 1910s, Hawaiian music blended with English lyrics, a mix Hawaiians called hapa haole. In the 1930s, electric amplification was invented for the lap steel, allowing it to be heard clearly without needing a sound box. This innovation also let electric lap steels be made in any shape, even ones that looked nothing like a traditional guitar.

In the early 1900s, Hawaiian music and the steel guitar influenced other styles, such as blues, jazz, gospel, country music, and sub-genres like Western swing, honky-tonk, and bluegrass. Early lap steel players included musicians like Sol Hoopii, Bob Dunn, Jerry Byrd, Don Helms, Bud Isaacs, Leon McAuliffe, Josh Graves, Pete Kirby, and Darick Campbell.

A lap steel guitar can be compared to playing a guitar with one finger (the steel bar). This comparison shows one of the instrument’s main limitations: it can only play one chord at a time without re-tuning. Early solutions involved building lap steels with two or more necks, each with a different set of strings. Musicians could move their hands between necks as needed. However, these multi-neck guitars were expensive, and most musicians could not afford them. In 1940, pedals were added to the lap steel to change the pitch of certain strings, allowing more complex chords to be played on a single neck. By 1952, this invention changed how the instrument was played, creating a new type called "pedal steel." Most lap steel players adopted the pedal design, and by the late 1950s, the lap steel became rarely used, except in country and Hawaiian music.

Early history

Spanish guitars were brought to the Hawaiian Islands as early as the 1830s. The Hawaiians did not use the same way of tuning guitars that had been common for many years. Instead, they adjusted the guitar strings so that all the strings made a chord when played together, a method called "open tuning." This style was named "slack-key," or "kī hōʻalu" in Hawaiian, because some strings were loosened to create the sound. Hawaiians learned to play the guitar using their fingers, making melodies over the deep, resonant tones of the open strings. This style of playing became known as slack-key guitar.

Around 1885, after steel guitar strings became available, Joseph Kekuku on the island of Oahu developed a new way to play. He held the guitar across his knees and pressed a steel bar against the strings while playing. Inspired by Kekuku, other Hawaiians began to play this way, placing the guitar across their laps instead of holding it against their bodies. As this horizontal style became popular in Hawaii, it spread worldwide and was often called "Hawaiian style" outside of the islands.

Hawaiian music, especially with the sound of the steel guitar, became very popular in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1916, recordings of traditional Hawaiian music sold more than any other type of music in the United States. This popularity led to the creation of guitars designed to be played horizontally. The classic lap steel guitar is an acoustic Hawaiian guitar. Although these early versions had a hollow body to produce sound, they were not loud enough compared to other instruments. In the early 1930s, a steel guitarist named George Beauchamp invented the electric guitar pickup. This invention allowed the lap steel guitar to be heard clearly and made the hollow body unnecessary. As a result, steel guitars could be made in many shapes, including rectangular blocks that looked nothing like traditional guitars. These flat, metal-framed instruments on legs were called "console steels."

Types of lap steel guitars

There are three types of lap steel guitars:

• Acoustic lap steel guitars: These are traditional acoustic steel-string guitars changed to be played on the performer’s lap. The strings are raised higher above the fingerboard than on a regular guitar. This is done by adding an adapter to the bridge and nut of the instrument. This design keeps the steel bar from touching the frets.

• Dobro-type guitars or National guitars: These are usually acoustic steel guitars with a large aluminum cone under the bridge. This cone is called a resonator and helps make the sound louder. Guitars with wooden bodies are called "Dobros," and those with steel bodies are called "Nationals." Dobros and Nationals sound different—Nationals have a brighter tone and are often preferred by blues musicians. These guitars can have round necks (used for Spanish music) or square necks (used for Hawaiian music). Square necks are sometimes needed because of the thicker strings and the extra force from the raised strings.

• Electric lap steel guitars: These are designed to be played horizontally and have an electric pickup that does not require a sound chamber. These guitars can look very different from one another. Some are made from solid wooden blocks, while others are small enough to be played on the lap. Some have more than one neck, making them heavier, and others are built on a frame with legs, called a console steel.

Tunings

Over many years in Western countries, the traditional Spanish guitar became widely tuned using a specific pattern of intervals: E–A–D–G–B–E, which includes steps of fourths and one major third. However, no standard tuning existed for Hawaiian guitars, which were often tuned to match a specific chord that fit the singer's voice. Starting in the 1850s with slack-key guitar, Hawaiian tunings became closely kept secrets, passed down through families. Some players loosened their guitar strings when not playing to prevent others from learning their tuning.

The tuning of these instruments is essential for creating the steel guitar style. The chosen tuning determines the notes available in a chord and influences how notes are played in order. In the 1930s, Hawaiian musicians often experimented with different tunings, creating patterns that later musicians used as a base for their styles. Many tunings are available for lap steel guitar players. Adding a sixth interval to a tuning greatly expanded the steel guitar's possibilities, creating new positions and playing areas that were not available in simple major chords. The tuning C was common for six-string lap steels in the 1920s and 1930s. Tunings with a sixth interval are often used in Western swing and jazz, while tunings with sevenths are frequently used in blues and rock music.

A major challenge in designing lap steel guitars is the limited number of chords and chord inversions available in any given tuning. To overcome this, some early players kept a second lap steel guitar with a different tuning ready for use. Another method was adding more strings to the instrument, as more strings allow for smaller pitch gaps, giving access to more notes when the bar is placed across the strings. A third method was attaching extra necks to the same instrument, allowing separate sets of strings to be tuned differently.

The Hawaiian "craze" in the United States

In the early 1900s, after Hawaii became part of the United States in 1898, Hawaiian music became very popular in the mainland U.S. This was shown through radio, theater performances, and movies that included Hawaiian songs. Hollywood films helped spread the image of a peaceful and idealized island life. Hawaiian guitars and music lessons were widely available. For example, the Oahu Music Company sold its Oahu-brand guitars and lessons to young people through door-to-door sales, reaching nearly every city in the United States.

The steel guitar was the first foreign instrument to become popular in American pop music. Between 1915 and 1930, early lap steel guitar players included Sol K. Bright Sr., Tau Moe, Dick McIntire, Sam Ku West, and Frank Ferera. Ferera was the most recorded lap-style guitarist during this time. Hawaiian music began to mix with American popular music in the 1910s. Hawaiians called this mixed style "hapa haole," which meant Hawaiian music sung in English for white audiences. For example, Honolulu-born Dick McIntire and his group, the Harmony Hawaiians, recorded Hawaiian songs performed by American singer Bing Crosby in 1936. Music publishers in Tin Pan Alley responded to the demand for Hawaiian songs by producing many hapa haole songs. In the 1930s and 1940s, many amateur and professional musicians across America formed Hawaiian music groups. The invention of electric guitars in the 1930s greatly increased the popularity of commercial Hawaiian music.

Lap steel pioneers

In the early 1900s, many people helped develop the lap steel guitar. Among them were three important musicians:

Sol Ho'opi'i (pronounced Ho-OH-pee-EE) was a famous Hawaiian musician who popularized lap steel guitar music around the world. He was the first to mix Hawaiian music with American jazz. Born in Honolulu in 1902, he played lap steel guitar very well from a young age. As a teenager, he hid on a ship traveling from Hawaii to San Francisco. After arriving in California, he formed a musical group and became famous in clubs, theaters, and movies from 1925 to 1950. He blended Hawaiian music with jazz he heard from clarinet and horn players. He was a pioneer in using the metal-bodied National Tricone guitar, later the Rickenbacker Bakelite, and Dickerson electric steels.

Bob Dunn was the first well-known steel guitarist to play Western swing music. Born in 1908 in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, he left school in the eighth grade to join traveling musical groups. According to music writer Michael Ross, Dunn played the first electrified instrument on a commercial recording. This was a Western swing song released in 1935, performed with "Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies." The guitar he used was a Rickenbacker A22, called the "Frying Pan." Before becoming a guitarist, Dunn played the trombone. His guitar style included solos that sounded like horn music and used short, quick notes similar to jazz players. Historian Andy Volk said his work greatly influenced future steel guitar players.

Jerry Byrd was born in 1920 in Lima, Ohio. As a young boy, he saw a traveling show featuring Hawaiians playing Hawaiian music with a polished National steel guitar. He was deeply impressed by the sound and look of the instrument and said, "That was the day that changed my life." Byrd’s career included both Hawaiian and country music. He helped create the Nashville steel guitar sound. He is credited with developing the C tuning that became standard for C pedal steels. He recorded songs with Hank Williams, such as "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Lovesick Blues," and "A Mansion on the Hill." He also recorded with Marty Robbins, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb. Later in life, Byrd moved to Hawaii and made it his home.

Western Swing

In the early 1930s, the electric lap steel guitar became an important part of a type of dance music called "Western swing," which mixed elements of jazz, country, and Hawaiian music. Important people who helped develop this style included bandleaders Milton Brown and Bob Wills. Wills supported and trained creative musicians, such as Leon McAuliffe, Noel Boggs, and Herb Remington, who later influenced the genre.

In October 1936, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, along with McAuliffe, who played a Rickenbacker B–6 lap steel guitar, recorded a popular song called "Steel Guitar Rag." As musicians needed more chord options, the lap steel guitar's design and playing style changed over time. McAuliffe owned two Rickenbackers, each tuned differently. Because of the instrument's limitations, steel guitarists added extra necks with different tunings to one instrument. This made lap steels the first electric instruments with multiple necks. The added size and weight made it hard to hold the instrument on the lap, so players placed it in a frame with legs called a "console" steel guitar. This type of instrument is still called a lap steel today. During this time, musicians like Herb Remington and Noel Boggs used instruments with four necks, made possible by instrument maker Leo Fender.

Honky-tonk

By the late 1940s, the steel guitar became an important part of the developing "honky-tonk" style of country music, which began in Texas and Oklahoma bars and dance halls known as honky-tonks. This style uses a simple two-beat rhythm with a strong backbeat. Honky-tonk singers who used a lap steel guitar in their music included Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, and Webb Pierce.

Don Helms (1927–2008), born in New Brockton, Alabama, played a double-neck Gibson lap steel guitar using E and B tunings on recordings by these three artists, as well as on more than 100 songs by Hank Williams, including "Your Cheating Heart," "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love with You)," and "Cold, Cold Heart." Helms' playing style helped change country music from the hillbilly string-band sound popular in the 1930s to the modern electric style that became common in the 1940s. His guitar introductions, solos, and fills have been widely copied for 50 years. Other classic country songs featuring Helms' work include "Walkin' After Midnight" (Patsy Cline) and "Blue Kentucky Girl" (Loretta Lynn). Many recordings from the 1950s used a steel guitar tuned to a sixth chord, often a C, which is sometimes called a "Texas tuning."

Dobro

The Dobro, also called a resonator guitar, is a special type of lap steel guitar made in the United States. It has a cone inside that helps the guitar sound louder. The Dopyera brothers invented it in 1927, and the name "Dobro" came from combining parts of their names, "Dopyera" and "Brothers." Over time, "Dobro" became a common name for this kind of guitar. However, blues musicians usually preferred another guitar called the National, which also had a resonator but used a metal body instead. According to music writer Richard Carlin, the Dobro might have disappeared from music if not for two important players: Pete Kirby and Uncle Josh Graves (Buck Graves).

Beecher "Pete" Kirby (1911–1992), also known as Bashful Brother Oswald, was born in Sevierville, Tennessee. He played the Dobro for Roy Acuff’s "Smoky Mountain Boys" starting in 1939. His Dobro performances on the Grand Ole Opry helped shape early country music. Kirby introduced the Dobro to a large radio audience. He played a Dobro Model 27 and sometimes a steel-bodied National guitar. He was known for wearing a wide-brimmed hat and overalls while performing comedic acts. People were curious about his Dobro and often asked to see it. Kirby stayed with Roy Acuff for 53 years.

Buck "Josh" Graves (also called "Uncle Josh Graves"), born in 1927, played the Dobro in the early bluegrass band "Flatt and Scruggs" in 1955. He helped make the Dobro a regular part of bluegrass bands. He developed a style that matched the skill of his bandmates by using fast finger movements to play open and fretted notes together. He also used a three-finger picking method taught by Earl Scruggs. After hearing his fast solos, many other bluegrass groups added a Dobro to their music. Graves improved the way the lap steel guitar was played, making it work well with the banjo, fiddle, and mandolin.

The Dobro was not widely used in mainstream country music until the 1970s, when a bluegrass revival brought it back. Younger musicians, such as Jerry Douglas, became famous for their Dobro skills and influenced others to play the instrument.

Sacred steel

This gospel music style, now known as "sacred steel," started in the 1930s during church services in the "House of God," a small African-American church group. The steel guitar became a different choice instead of the church organ. Darick Campbell (1966–2020) was a lap steel player for the gospel band, The Campbell Brothers, who helped spread the music to people around the world. Campbell used a type of lap steel guitar called the Fender Stringmaster 8-string (Fender Deluxe-8). He used his hand to control the sound's loudness and a special pedal called a wah pedal. Born in Rochester, New York, Campbell was skilled at making his guitar sound like a human voice. He said, "My method is to always think of my guitar as a voice." Campbell performed at many music festivals, but church leaders did not support his popularity in rock and jazz groups. The Campbell Brothers had a difficult and angry separation from the Nashville-based House of God Church, Keith Dominion, because the Pentecostal church wanted to keep the music inside the church. Campbell recorded music with The Allman Brothers and Medeski Martin and Wood.

Lap slide guitar

Lap slide guitar is not a specific instrument but a way of playing lap steel guitar, often found in blues or rock music. Musicians who play these styles usually say "slide" instead of "steel." They may use a flat pick or their fingers, not finger picks, to play. Important early players of lap slide guitar include Buddy Woods, "Black Ace" Turner (who used a small medicine bottle as a slide), and Freddie Roulette. Turner played a National Style 2 square neck Tricone guitar on his lap.

Another blues guitar style is called "slide guitar," which combines elements of steel guitar and regular guitar. It is played by holding a regular guitar flat against the body. The player presses the lower strings as usual to create rhythm, while using a tube-shaped slide (or the neck of a bottle) placed on a finger of the same hand to slide along the higher-pitched strings. In 1923, Sylvester Weaver was the first to record this style. In the 1940s, blues musicians like Robert Nighthawk and Earl Hooker made this style popular using electric guitars in standard tuning. This style was once called "bottleneck." Early blues players used open tunings, but most modern slide guitarists use both standard and open tunings.

Lap steel obsolescence

The cost of making many necks on each guitar made lap steels too expensive for most players. A better solution was needed. Many inventors tried to create a mechanical system to change the pitch of strings on steel guitars. Gibson introduced a pedal steel guitar as early as 1940, but it was not widely used. Around 1946, Paul Bigsby designed a new pedal system that improved the instrument. Working alone in his shop, Bigsby made guitars for famous players, including Joaquin Murphey and Speedy West. In 1952, Nashville guitarist Bud Isaacs received one of Bigsby’s two-pedal guitars. It was a wooden guitar with eight strings. Isaacs tested the new pedals in an E tuning, trying to copy the sound of two fiddles playing together. In doing so, he discovered a new method: pushing the pedal while the strings were still making sound. This practice had been avoided before because it was seen as poor technique and "un-Hawaiian." Isaacs wanted to use the pedal mechanism itself as a musical feature. His technique created a triad chord, where two lower notes bent upward in a smooth, sliding motion to harmonize with a higher note that stayed the same. The pedal allowed this movement to happen perfectly and consistently.

In 1953, Isaacs used this technique during a recording session for a Webb Pierce song called "Slowly." The song became one of the most-played country songs in 1954 and reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country charts for seventeen weeks. Isaacs’ guitar was the first pedal steel guitar on a hit record. More importantly, the sound was recognized by lap steel (non-pedal) guitarists as unique and impossible to create on non-pedal instruments. Many musicians quickly added pedals to their steel guitars to copy the special bending notes in Isaacs’ playing. After this recording, instrument makers and musicians worked to copy the innovations of Bigsby and Isaacs. Even though pedal steel guitars had been available for over a decade, the instrument became a key part of country music after the song’s success. Pedals allowed players to create more complex and versatile music than was possible on lap steels.

By the early 1950s, most lap steel players adopted the pedal steel design. The new playing style became a defining feature of country music from Nashville for many years. As a result, non-pedal lap steels became mostly outdated, with only a few musicians continuing to use them in country and Hawaiian music.

Jimmy Day was an example of a successful lap steel player who switched to pedals during his career. Other well-known players, such as Noel Boggs, Jerry Byrd, and Joaquin Murphey, refused to use pedals. According to music historian Rich Kienzle, Boggs’ refusal to switch hurt his later career. In a 1972 interview, Jerry Byrd said: "Mechanically, there were many problems, and the guitar was hard to keep in tune, which drove me crazy." He added, "I decided to stay with what I had and keep my identity." Joaquin Murphey continued using non-pedal lap steels long after others had switched. He used a C tuning and believed the Nashville-standard E tuning was a "gimmick." In a 1995 interview, he said, "I can’t do all that fancy Nashville stuff, and I hate it anyhow."