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 Suppose someone gives you a guitar, and it's out of tune. You have no idea how to tune it or play it, but it sure makes a nice sound when you pluck a string. What do you do with the thing? The Hawaiians found themselves in this situation. Here's the story: In 1792, George Vancouver gave King Kamehameha 10 cows and 2 bulls. The Hawaiians had never seen a cow before. They seemed to be sort of like big dogs. They didn't know quite what to do with this generous gift, so the cows were allowed to roam around at will. They were the king's cows, and nobody was going to mess with them. There was plenty of grass around, so the cows grazed away. All would have been OK, but the size of the herd kept growing over the years. Eating grass seems like a harmless thing - unless you live in a grass house. The cows were becoming a growing problem, so Kamehameha III made a deal with the Mexicans, for some cowpokes to come over for a while and teach the locals how to ride and rope (yeeha!). The Mexican vaqueros were called Paniolos, and this name was adopted by the Hawaiians they trained. The Mexicans brought their own form of musical entertainment with them in the form of guitars. When they departed, they left some of their guitars. So how do you teach yourself the guitar? What those clever locals did was to re-tune them by slackening the strings enough to form chords that could be strummed without any fingering on the frets. This made them relatively easy to play. You could tune your guitar to any old chord you like. You could also tune it to match your vocal range. Cool! A fairly common style of playing evolved from all this, using mostly picking rather than strumming, and a steady alternating base played on the top two strings. The Hawaiians are a creative bunch, and soon they were playing up a storm, and getting really good at it. There are said to be over 100 different tunings that have been devised over the years. So what happens when two slack key musicians want to play together? Right, chaos. But thanks to the aloha spirit, and the Hawaiian quality called laulima (working together) - plus capos and some retuning, slack key guitarists can even play together. Dancing Cat Records has created a nice informational booklet "A Short History of Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar (Ki ho'alu)". It is available directly from Dancing Cat Records or you can view a pdf version from here. |