I saw the following while looking for wire stories at my paper. It is an
article on Slack Key guitar playing...... We all know about Pat Simmons'
beautiful playing of slack key. I figured you guys would have some interest
in the article.
SLACK KEY -- Some musical traditions are easy to trace. The free-flowing
sound of the blues, for example, was born from slave chants. Contemporary
folk music can be traced to an earlier British Isles. Even Jerry Lee Lewis'
rowdy piano playing arguably has some ties to the stately notes of Mozart.
Ki ho alu, or the traditional Hawaiian slack key guitar, evolved from
something far
different: the cow. Or, to be specific: cowboys.
Slack key guitar master Keola Beamer shared the folk tale with WorldBeat.
"The guitar was introduced to Hawaii in about 1830 by the Spanish vaqueros
(cowboys), who came over on behalf of King Kamehameha III," he said. "The big
island was experiencing the influx of large hoofed animals, cows in
particular."
The cowboys brought more than their cowpunching abilities with them, Beamer
said.
"They played some pieces at the campfire after work, and the Hawaiians
immediately fell in love with the sound of the guitar," he said. "They didn't
stay long
enough to teach us how to tune it, so that's how our wild imaginations came
in and we thought up these wild ways to tune a guitar."
Thus began ki ho alu, which literally means "loosen the key." Not knowing
precisely how their visitors had tuned their guitars, the Hawaiians retuned
their guitars to
emulate the ranges of their own voices, said Beamer.
Now, he said, "slack key guitar" describes a tuning technique as well as a
playing style, performed on the instrument recognized worldwide as a guitar.
The technique threatened to disappear completely in the latter part of the
last century, when Hawaiians sought to protect their culture from
missionaries and other Western influences, Beamer said. "Hawaiians had lost
so much -- their religious system,
their life, their place in the universe, the things they really held close --
that they went
underground," Beamer said. "It became sort of a mystical cult, and you
couldn't hear
anyone play it or buy any recordings."
Slack key guitar playing became a knowledge guarded closely within families
that had performed the music for generations. The technique was in danger of
dying out.
That began changing when local artists such as Dennis Kamakahi and Led
Kaapana began badgering their parents and grandparents about the nearly lost
art, asking their elders toteach them slack key guitar.
Now, thanks to Kamakahi, Kaapana, Beamer and new-age artist George Winston,
slack key guitar playing has emerged from the underground. Winston, especially
deserves credit for raising the technique's profile: He's released a number
of albums dedicated to the genre on his Dancing Cat label.
Winston did slack key guitar a favor, said Beamer. "We realized that � slack
key guitar was dying, because we were holding it so close," said Beamer. "We
loved it so much, we were suffocating it. � Now it will live past my
generation.
Tim on MS Gulf Coast
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