Slack key guitar: From cowboys to the islands

Hawaiian musicians like Led Kaapana helped save "slack key guitar" from obscurity

(CNN) -- Some musical traditions are easy to trace. The free-flowing sound of the blues, for example, was born from slave chants. Contemporary folk music can be traced to an earlier British Isles. Even Jerry Lee Lewis' rowdy piano playing arguably has some ties to the stately notes of Mozart.

Ki ho alu, or the traditional Hawaiian slack key guitar, evolved from something far different: the cow. Or, to be specific: cowboys.

Slack key guitar master Keola Beamer shared the folk tale with WorldBeat.

"The guitar was introduced to Hawaii in about 1830 by the Spanish vaqueros (cowboys), who came over on behalf of King Kamehameha III," he said. "The big island was experiencing the influx of large hoofed animals, cows in particular."

VIDEO WorldBeat's Brooke Alexander looks at the Hawaiian tradition of slack key guitar Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)   AUDIO "Black Sand" 82K WAV sound "Ulilie" 320K WAV sound

The cowboys brought more than their cowpunching abilities with them, Beamer said.

"They played some pieces at the campfire after work, and the Hawaiians immediately fell in love with the sound of the guitar," he said. "They didn't stay long enough to teach us how to tune it, so that's how our wild imaginations came in and we thought up these wild ways to tune a guitar."

Thus began ki ho alu, which literally means "loosen the key."

Not knowing precisely how their visitors had tuned their guitars, the Hawaiians retuned their guitars to emulate the ranges of their own voices, said Beamer.

Now, he said, "slack key guitar" describes a tuning technique as well as a playing style, performed on the instrument recognized worldwide as a guitar.

The technique threatened to disappear completely in the latter part of the last century, when Hawaiians sought to protect their culture from missionaries and other Western influences, Beamer said.

"Hawaiians had lost so much -- their religious system, their life, their place in the universe, the things they really held close -- that they went underground," Beamer said. "It became sort of a mystical cult, and you couldn't hear anyone play it or buy any recordings."

Slack key guitar playing became a knowledge guarded closely within families that had performed the music for generations. The technique was in danger of dying out.

That began changing when local artists such as Dennis Kamakahi and Led Kaapana began badgering their parents and grandparents about the nearly lost art, asking their elders to teach them slack key guitar.

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Now, thanks to Kamakahi, Kaapana, Beamer and new-age artist George Winston, slack key guitar playing has emerged from the underground. Winston, especially deserves credit for raising the technique's profile: He's released a number of albums dedicated to the genre on his Dancing Cat label.

Winston did slack key guitar a favor, said Beamer.

"We realized that É slack key guitar was dying, because we were holding it so close," said Beamer. "We loved it so much, we were suffocating it. É Now it will live past my generation."

Travel Guide: Hawaii beyond the beach
March 31, 1999

Official Site: George Winston's Dancing Cat Records
Old Hawaii page of Hawaiian traditions
Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Network

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