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208 Part IV: Sounding Like the Masters: Blues Styles through the Ages Quintessential Blues: Slide Guitar
Slide guitar may have become a stylistic choice over fretted guitar out of necessity
by players who didn’t have the skills or patience to fret the guitar and
found it easy to slide a smooth, rounded object over the strings to achieve a
similar effect. But for the greatest practitioners such as Charlie Patton,
Sylvester Weaver, Blind Willie Johnson, Son House, and Robert Johnson, slide
guitar was an unparalleled mode of expression evocative of the human voice as
well as the wail of train whistles — a sound near and dear to country blues guitarists.
But whatever its origin, slide guitar is a staple of the acoustic blues
guitar sound unlikely to ever be imitated by synthetic, digital means.
The tools that let you slide
Early, rural-dwelling slide players used anything they could find to produce
the slide effect. The edge of a pocket knife, a length of pipe, a section of bone
from a ham or beef shank, and a medicine bottle were among some of the top
“tools” used, but the most popular and effective was a broken bottle neck
(which was filed or fired to eliminate the sharp edges). Because the bottle
neck was probably the most popular, slide blues guitar is sometimes called
bottleneck guitar.
These days, you acquire your slippery weapon of choice by going to a music
store and selecting from the pre-packaged slides in the display case. Metal and
glass tubes are the two most common styles (though prepared bottlenecks
are available, too) and come in various diameters to fit different-sized fingers.
Metal slides, especially those made from brass, are heavier (they
have more mass), bolder-sounding, and provide better sustain, but
they’re more difficult to master.
Glass slides are light and have a rounder, mellower tone.
TEAM LinG
Sliding technique
Many Delta players combined slide technique with fretting, often having the
slide play the melodic portions while their fretting fingers played chordal
figures or kept the bass line going. This technique dictated the wearing of
the slide on the fourth finger (the pinky). Follow the steps below to perfect
your slide technique: