History of the Pedal Steel Guitar

Series Summary

The pedal steel guitar looks like two necks of a standard guitar flattened onto a small table. Players sit down to play, fretting the strings with a metal slide and plucking them with fingerpicks. Although the pedal steel is mainly associated with country western music, its distinctive sound has appeared on several rock records and even a few soul songs. The most well-known cross-over player is Peter “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow, an associate of Gram Parsons who performed with Parsons in the Flying Burrito Brothers. He brought the instrument’s country twang to music by artists as diverse as Frank Zappa, Sly and the Family Stone, and Fleetwood Mac.

Our Expert Village virtuoso Bill Bassett tells you everything you need to know about the pedal steel guitar in this free series of instructional music videos. He begins with a brief overview of its history, then introduces you to the strings, pedals and knee levers. You also get a quick overview of the copedent, a chart which illustrates the tuning and pedal setup. Basset wraps up with tips for playing chords, practice suggestions and a demonstration of how the pedal steel sounds with different styles of music.

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village my name is Bill Bassett and I'm here to tell you about how to play the pedal steel guitar. I have been playing pedal steel guitar for about thirty-five years and I consider myself to be one of the luckiest people on the planet. I have been given the opportunity to be able to play music on the one most interesting thing and dynamic instruments ever created. I get to play here Bill Bassett in Arizona with a couple of different groups. At a western dinner show called the Blazing M Ranch and I'm one of the singing cowboys and I get to play the steel guitar and a couple of numbers there. I also play in a rock and roll band believe it or not I use this quiet a bit and the band called the Retros and over the years I have been so fortunate to be able to play with wonderful musicians around the country and in some cases around the world. And I got to work with some of the very best entertainers in the country music field and I feel just blessed to been part of all of that. Now the steel guitar grow out of a history that goes back probably several centuries from my understanding of it is that when explores from Spain and Portugal where traveling through the pacific islands they brought with them there guitars. The islanders in tern enjoyed the music but they never get the hang of playing guitar with their fingers they in turned used a rod of some sort. Perhaps it may have been a piece of wood or a polish stone I don't know. But they began using a rod to make notes on the string and eventually that became the Hawaiian guitar which is very very popular in turn of the twenty century and as that develop and more and more people began to play the Hawaiian guitar they weren't really loud. And somebody on the way in the thirties develop a solid body guitar but added a electric pick up on it and it is becoming the early version of the steel guitar and eventually in the late nineteen-forties some very creative and engineering types began attaching mechanism on them to stretch the string so they can play different chords without exerting themselves I suppose. But that lead to a whole new instrument called the pedal in the steel guitar is what we are talking about today. "