Bottleneck Slide Guitar and the History of The Blues

The moody, haunting sound of slide or bottleneck guitar has alter to ever extra universal in movie soundtracks, television advertising and TV programmes. Think of the film Paris Texas and you testament recall the eerie, plaintive sound of Ry Cooder's famous accompanying soundtrack.

The origins of the slide style of playing guitar can be traced to a one-stringed instrument that originates from West Africa. This ultra-basic melodic instrument developed, in America, into what is called a diddley-bow. This is a single-stringed instrument, usually household made, consisting of a wire lenghty between two screws or pegs along a length of wood. The string is plucked while the pitch is established using a piece of bone, metal or glass. Some diddley-bows were made by attaching the single-string to the wall of a shack or house. Lonnie Pitchford, a Mississippi bluesman, was bushy-tailed known for demonstrating his diddley-bow which used two nails hammered into a beam that formed part of his front porch. The gravestone of his grave is designed with a playable diddley-bow on its side.

It was in the Mississippi Delta region that the African influences on American harmony really took hold. Many emancipated slaves moved to the area after the American civil war bringing with them their case for rhythm, dance and accessible euphonious instruments, one of which was the diddley-bow.

Innumerable have speculated that the Mississippi Delta is the birthplace of the blues. The first off documented blues tune was heard by WC Handy in either 1895 or1903 while at the train station in the town of Tutwiler, Mississippi. He is reported to acquire witnessed a bankrupt ebon mortal in ragged clothes and worn out shoes playing a guitar by urgent a knife against the strings to vary the pitch, bare much like Hawaiin guitarists would call steel bars. The tune the subject played was a haunting and doleful melody that made in toto an idea upon WC Handy.

It was during the 1890s that some chipper known American folk-blues tunes are thought to own originated including "Joe Turner Blues" and "Frankie and Johnnie". One well declared exponent of the style who originated at this time was Charley Patton. His precise birth date is alien but considering to have been between 1885 and 1892. He learned his mellifluous skills from the dudes around him including one Henry Sloan who was a fellow resident of the Dockery plantation in Ruleville, Mississippi. Some state that Henry Sloan is de facto the mysterious jet slide guitar player who'd been heard at the train station in Tutwiler by WC Handy.

It wasn't until 1929 that Patton was discovered by H.C. Spier, the white gift scout who famously auditioned notable blues performers in the back of his furniture store in Jackson Mississippi. In June of that year he recorded 14 tracks for Paramount records including well known blues classics "Pony Blues," "Banty Rooster Blues," "Bo Weavil Blues," "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues" and "A Spoonful Blues". Pony Blues with Banty Rooster went on to sell 10,000 copies making Patton a significant star for Paramount records.

Another fantastically influential blues man who made tape for Paramount records in 1930 was Son House. His distinctive playing style which featured a strong, repetitive, hypnotic rhythm was to be enormously important in future decades. His guitar playing was accompanied by his distinctive vocals which were derived from the laments and hollers of the chain gangs, probably influenced by the chronology he'd spent in jail after allegedly killing a man.

No discussion of the blues and bottleneck guitar playing would be full-dress without mentioning Robert Johnson, probably the most famous of the bountiful influential Delta Blues men. He made a host of landmark recordings between 1936 and 1937 and his guitar playing skills and song writing genius have influenced countless thousands of blues and rock-and-roll artists in the decades owing to his untimely death at the age of only 27.

The bottleneck or slide guitar style is synonymous with the blues. It is a style of playing that enables notes to tremble, to sound uncertain, to sound cognate the human voice or someone crying. It's a style of playing that doesn't demand any fancy or expensive equipment production it promptly accessible and appealing. The slide guitar sound is at the moment engaging however at the same era can evoke feelings of sadness and melancholia. Slide guitar is what the blues is all about.

By Tony Gee
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