The statue of Joseph Kekuku at the Polynesian Culture Center, Laie, HI

Clay County Histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC

The pantheon of great guitarists includes names like Robert Johnson, Eric Clapton, Jimmi Hendrix, Slash, and Eddie Van Halen. Put the name Joseph Kekuku at the top of that list. He changed music more than any of these guys. He invented the steel guitar.
Joseph Kekuku was born in Laie, Hawaii, in 1874. As a teenager, he started playing “Spanish guitar” – that’s what everybody called acoustic guitars before electric guitars were invented. One day, while he picked the strings with his right hand as usual, he for some reason slid a metal railroad spike up and down the fretboard with his left hand. He loved the sound. When he demonstrated the technique for other local guitarists, they loved it, too. They copied it, and it became the sound of Hawaii.
What does a steel guitar sound like? Imagine Bugs Bunny just popped out of his hole, wondering where he ended up after he took that turn at Albuquerque. We immediately know he’s in Hawaii because the song “Aloha Oe” is playing. That sound is the Hawaiian steel guitar.
Kekuku and other guitarists developed their own playing technique. Instead of putting the guitar under their arm, they found it easier to sit down with the guitar facing up on their lap. They raised the strings higher. They replaced the railroad spike with cut glass bottlenecks or metal cylinders they could slip onto their fingers, eventually evolving into the custom metal paperweight thingy steel guitarists use now.
In 1904, Kekuku left Hawaii and spent the rest of his days as a travelling musician in the mainland USA and around the world. Other Hawaiian guitarists did the same, capitalizing on a Hawaii obsession that spread across America in the early 20th century. When they played shows in the segregated South, Hawaiians were considered “Colored” and therefore could not stay in white only hotels. Because of this, Hawaiians found themselves hanging out with African American musicians, who adopted their slide steel guitar style.
Listen to Aloha Oe or other Hawaiian guitar music. Now listen to old blues legends like Son House and Robert Johnson and you will hear how they adopted the Hawaiian sliding technique. Now listen to Eric Clapton, who idolized these old blues guitarists, and you can hear Hawaii in Rock music. Listen to Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys to hear how steel guitars were central to the Western Swing style that merged jazz and “hillbilly music.” That music would evolve into today’s Country Music, which loves a steel guitar. It’s strange, but believe your own ears: you can hear Hawaii in every Honky Tonk.
Steel guitars kept evolving until they became a separate kind of guitar. It was a steel guitar, not a Spanish guitar, that was the first to go fully electric. In 1931, George Beauchamp invented the Electro A-22, nicknamed the Frying Pan because it was made out of cast aluminum. Beauchamp’s innovation was the idea that music could be made entirely with electrical signals, so you don’t need a guitar to be a hollow box of resonating wood. It could just as easily be a solid hunk of aluminum. Leo Fender, one of the inventors of the solid body (Spanish) electric guitar, originally opened his factory to produce solid body steel guitars in the mid-1940s. Steel guitars further evolved to be built into tabletops with foot pedals. Audience members might mistake them for a keyboard until they see the right hand picking and the left hand sliding.