Hawai'ian Style: A Song History

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"Hawai'ian Style" appears in Steve Eulberg's Dulci-Bro: Method And Resources For Playing Resonator Dulcimer, a Fingers Of Steel book that combines dulcimer technique with blues guitar styles and offers notes, scales, slide techniques and several tunes in four different tunings.[1] The book's song list gives it in D, F-sharp, A, B tuning, which the list assigns to only one other piece, "Aloha 'Oe," and the listing names no composer.[1] Eulberg's video course on the instrument at Dulcimer Crossing also includes a lesson titled "DulciBro Hawaiian Style."[2]

A small wooden ukulele with a round sound hole, standing upright

Ukulele, mahogany, hardwood and metal, ca. 1880. A Hawaiian instrument, shown for the title; it has no connection to the piece.

The steel guitar, played on the lap with a metal bar called a steel, originated in Hawaii in the late nineteenth century, and Britannica credits Joseph Kekuku with retuning the guitar and devising a way of holding it on the lap.[3] According to the New York Public Library, Hawaiian steel guitarists looking for more volume helped drive the development of the National resonator guitar in Los Angeles, and Sol Ho'opi'i, the star of the city's Hawaiian guitar scene, served as a leading endorser.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Hawai'ian Style"

Sources

  1. Fingers Of Steel: "Steve Eulberg, Dulci-Bro: Method And Resources For Playing Resonator Dulcimer".
  2. Dulcimer Crossing: "Introduction to the Dulci-Bro".
  3. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Steel guitar".
  4. New York Public Library: "Hawaiian Steel Guitar as Resistance Music: Tracing a Hidden History".
  5. Image: Ukulele, mahogany, hardwood and metal, ca. 1880. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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