Sacred Steel
Located in 2 routes
Electric lap-steel and pedal-steel played as a second human voice inside Pentecostal worship — a fretless, crying, vibrato-heavy tone bent through E-based major tunings so it whoops, moans, and talks like the preacher, trading phrases with the lead singer and answering the congregation line for line over a bare church rhythm section of electric guitar, bass, and drums. Tempos run from slow, weeping, almost formless hymn readings to hard-driving praise shuffles where the steel's melodic lines are punctuated by rhythmic strummed "frams" that push the room into clapping, shouting, and holy dance, and where a live cut is as likely to end in hollering, tambourine, and a closing prayer as a clean studio fade.
History
Steel guitar entered African American worship in the mid-1930s when Philadelphia brothers Troman and Willie Eason adapted the Hawaiian lap-steel craze — Troman took lessons from Hawaiian player Jack Kahanalopua, and Willie, self-taught, turned the instrument into a "talking" voice and carried it into the House of God, Keith Dominion and the Church of the Living God, Jewell Dominion, two of the three dominions the church founded by Mary Magdalena Lewis Tate in 1903 split into after her death, where the steel replaced the organ as the central worship instrument; Willie Eason taught Henry Nelson and Lorenzo Harrison, and Nelson's rhythmically strummed praise style became the accepted "House of God music" of the Keith Dominion while Harrison anchored the Jewell Dominion's distinct approach, the tradition spreading through the church convention circuit across some twenty-two states with Florida a particular stronghold; Eason cut roughly eighteen commercial sides in the 1940s and '50s, including the topical "Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Poor Man's Friend", but the music stayed almost entirely inside the churches until Florida folklorist Robert L. Stone began documenting it in 1992, producing Sacred Steel: Traditional Sacred African-American Steel Guitar Music in Florida for Arhoolie Records in 1997 — the first of eight Stone-produced Arhoolie sacred steel albums — which put Sonny Treadway, Glenn Lee, Henry Nelson, Aubrey Ghent, Calvin Cooke, Ted Beard, and Rochester's Campbell Brothers in front of a folk, blues, and jam-festival audience for the first time; Chuck Campbell's custom pedal-steel tuning became the model for a younger generation and earned him a 2004 NEA National Heritage Fellowship, while Robert Randolph carried the church style furthest outside the church with Live at the Wetlands (2002) and the Warner Bros. album Unclassified (2003), a crossover that drew criticism from House of God leadership even as it pulled sacred steel into rock and jam-band vocabulary; the tradition continues in the churches and on stage through the Lee Boys, Calvin Cooke's ensemble, and third-generation players such as A.J. Ghent, and Stone's fieldwork survives as the Robert Stone Sacred Steel Collection at the Arhoolie Foundation.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- Just a Closer Walk with Thee(1997) — Willie EasonSpotifyYouTube
- Praise the Lord Everybody(1997) — Henry NelsonSpotifyYouTube
- Praise Music(1997) — Aubrey GhentSpotifyYouTube
- Don't Let the Devil Ride(1997) — Sonny TreadwaySpotifyYouTube
- Call Him by His Name(1997) — Glenn LeeSpotifyYouTube
- Pass Me Not, Oh Gentle Savior(1997) — The Campbell BrothersSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- Robert L. Stone, "Sacred Steel: Inside an African American Steel Guitar Tradition" (University of Illinois Press, Music in American Life, 2010), https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/54kta8ay9780252035548.html
- "Sacred Steel: Traditional Sacred African-American Steel Guitar Music in Florida", produced by Robert Stone, Arhoolie CD 450 (1997), https://arhoolierecords.bandcamp.com/album/sacred-steel
- The Campbell Brothers featuring Katie Jackson, "Pass Me Not", Arhoolie CD 461 (1997), Smithsonian Folkways, https://folkways.si.edu/campbell-brothers-featuring-katie-jackson/pass-me-not/gospel/music/album/smithsonian
- National Endowment for the Arts, "Charles 'Chuck' T. Campbell", 2004 National Heritage Fellow, https://www.arts.gov/honors/heritage/charles-chuck-t-campbell