Heart of Steel 


The only USA musical instrument 

Banjo? Nah. Fiddle? No. Saxophone? Too Euro.
Steel guitar is the USA instrument Number One. We wanted it so bad, we annexed Hawaii.

This cat Kekuku was walking back from school where he studied what students of yore study, eyeing the idyllic railroad tracks that ran past his house with eyes shrouded in recent folk legend. Right thinking boy, and industrious too, he plucked a bolt from the side of the tracks and rubbed it on the frets of his old school strumming guitar. Hence he invented steel a day later, after recess, when he fashioned a real slide at the local machine shop and fixed the nut so the strings wouldn't rub the frets.
Years later, the mad steel skills of Sol Hoopi'i drive him into the tragic arms of Aimee Semple McPhereson, wailing the steel soul crazed 'til she crawled out of Douglas, AZ .
Wesley built up his slamming skills squeezing the teats of Missouri cows. When he figured he wrung his last, he headed out to LA and fell in love with an Electroharp. Henceforth he was known as Speedy.
Troman met a an old Hawaiian named Jack in Philidelphia during the Great Depression. A talk with the bishop later and the steel guitar was sanctified, pitching humans into fits of dangling psalmodic frenzy.

What is more USA than that?  

Posted: Thu - April 1, 2004 at 08:50 PM           |

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