Steel guitar began showing up in country music in the 1920s. Jimmie Rodgers featured acoustic steel guitar in “Tuck Away My Lonesome Blues” (1929).
The electrified steel guitar appeared in the 1930s (Bob Dunn of Milton Brown and His Brownies western swing band). Leon McAuliffe advanced steel guitar technique in his 1936 composition “Steel Guitar Rag” that helped popularize the style. By the late 1940s steel guitar was prominently featured in “honky tonk” country music arrangements; Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce.
Steel guitar method was developed in Hawaii by Joseph Kekuku in the late 19th century. The steel guitar is usually positioned horizontally with the treble strings uppermost and the bass strings towards the player, and by using a steel above the fingerboard rather than fretting the strings with the fingers; strings are plucked with one hand, while the other hand changes the pitch of one or more strings with the use of a bar or slide called a steel (generally made of metal but also glass). This may be done with any guitar but is most common on instruments designed and produced for this style of play.
Great (non-pedal) steel players are few and far between because some techniques can be challenging such as slanting the bar, palm damping, thumb damping, and styles of picking not easily mastered.
The Hawaiian guitar style often involves slack-key played in the conventional Spanish position using a conventional fretted guitar in various open tunings, generally with the strings tuned considerably lower than usual. Steel guitar tunings tend to feature closer intervals (2nds and 3rds) whereas slack-key tunings more often contain 4ths and 5ths.
Dobro is a brand of resonator guitars, but the word is most often used to describe bluegrass instruments of several different brands. Tunings and techniques are similar to acoustic Hawaiian steel guitar playing, but have evolved somewhat differently in the bluegrass idiom, which generally involves faster picking and changes than Hawaiian music does.
Bottleneck guitar may have developed from Steel guitar technique. It is similar but the guitar is held in the conventional position and a tubular form of slide is slipped over the middle, ring or little finger to accommodate the playing position. The slide is almost never slanted. Common bottleneck tunings are open D and E chords.
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