"Ricky W. Hunt" wrote in message
news:JF1ed.285798$MQ5.15254@attbi_s52...
"Ben Bradley" wrote in message
...

I heard a famous slide player (can't remember who at the moment) talk
about
how slide came about. He said the only guitars most of the guys in the
poor
neighborhoods could get were of such poor quality and bad action that you
could literally not press down the strings in some places and the slide
was
simply a mechanical device to overcome that. That certainly sounds
plausible
if you've ever played a cheap guitar.

It is. Another plausible possibility: in the early 20th century there was
something of a craze for Hawaiian music on the US mainland, including
Hawaiian slide guitar (played with the guitar on the lap and a heavy steel
in the left hand). Hawaiian troupes toured, and may have been seen by early
blues guitarists.

On the third hand, apparently blues guitarists were playing slide-style
guitars using the blade of a knife for fretting before the Hawaiian music
craze, so the latter may have reinforced an already-present idea.

On the fourth hand, a lot of musicologists trace slide-style playing back to
African stringed instruments and their playing styles. A lot of
African-American blues players got their start playing a "diddley-bow", a
single string (often a piece of fence wire) nailed to the side of a building
with two pieces of sharp-edged wood wedged in as bridges, played with
something that served as a slide, be it a knife-blade, a bottle neck, a
medicine bottle or a deep socket from Sears. It was also called a
"bow-diddley", and now you know where *his* name came from. Confusingly, a
"bow-diddley" sometimes also referred to a mouth-bow.

Peace,
Paul