524 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
energy of her Bon Temps Zydeco Band. It combines
two simple traditional song forms: the instrumental
portions are a binary dance, and the vocal portions
follow the familiar verse-and-chorus format.SLACK KEY GUITAR
The music of Hawai‘i reveals a range of native adap-
tations of music brought to the islands by immigrant
groups in the nineteenth century. Hawaiian musicians
acquired the guitar and similar stringed instruments
from the paniolo—the Hawaiian term (from español)
for the Spanish and Portuguese workers on sugar
plantations and Mexican vaqueros who worked on cat-
tle ranches. From the Portuguese cavaquinho, a small,
four-stringed guitar, native Hawaiians developed the
‘ukulele. A nother nineteenth-century Hawaiian inno-
vation is the lap steel guitar, an instrument later adopted
by country musicians, as described in chapter 11, and
further developed into the pedal steel guitar. One
important genre of Hawaiian music uses a standard
guitar, however, though in a variety of nonstandard
tunings: slack key takes its name from the practice of turning the tuning pegs to
lower the pitch of selected strings.
By the time slack key guitar was fi rst recorded in the 1940s, it had blended
traditional Hawaiian music with harmonies infl uenced by Christian hymns and
the mainland American popular music that had poured into the islands follow-
ing Hawai‘i’s annexation by the United States in 1898. At the start of the twenti-
eth century Hawaiian musicians had appropriated the popular songs of Tin Pan
Alley to create a style they called hapa haoli (half white), which in turn sparked
a mainland fad for things Hawaiian in the 1910s and 1920s. It is hapa haoli, the
mixture of Hawaiian and mainland pop, that most non-Hawaiians think of as
Hawaiian music. Slack key draws on all of these infl uences, including hapa haoli,
but is its own distinct genre.
Almost all slack key pieces require retuning the guitar, usually by lowering
some strings from their standard tuning so that the six strings form a major
chord, sometimes with an added note (a sixth or seventh).
E A D G B E (conventional tuning) D G D G B D (taro patch tuning)
C G E G A E (Mauna Loa tuning)
C F C E A C (double slack F)
The retunings allow the guitarist to play combinations of notes that do not easily
lie under the left hand in standard tuning. The other main element in the char-
acteristic sound of slack key is the fi ngerpicking technique, in which the thumb
plays an independent bass line on the lower strings, alternating low notes on the
beat with middle-register notes between the beats, while the other fi ngers play
melodies and chords on the upper strings.
For “Wai okeaniani” (LG 21.4), Ledward Kaapana, one of the great slack key
masters to emerge in the 1980s, uses “taro patch,” in which the open stringsLG 21.4K Slack key guitar
master Ledward Kaapana
(b. 1948).172028_21_514-530_r2_mr.indd 524 23/01/13 11:18 AM