The story
Imagine a young boy named Joseph Kekuku walking along a dusty road in Hawaii in the late 1880s. He is a student at the Kamehameha School, and he is carrying a guitar. The story goes that he spotted a rusted metal bolt lying in the dirt, and for reasons only a curious musician could truly understand, he picked it up and slid it across the strings of his guitar as he plucked them. The sound didn't just vibrate; it wailed. It let out a long, metallic sigh that mimicked the human voice in a way he had never heard before. Kekuku began experimenting, eventually laying the guitar flat across his lap and using a steel bar to find the notes between the frets. By the time he and other Hawaiian masters began touring the United States mainland in the early 1900s, they brought with them a sound that felt like liquid light.
Around that same time, a thousand miles away in a humid train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, a composer named W.C. Handy was waiting for a train that was several hours late. It was 1903. He eventually fell asleep on a wooden bench, only to be jolted awake by a sound he would later describe as the weirdest music he had ever heard. A man sat near him in the shadows, pressing the flat blade of a pocketknife against the strings of a guitar, sliding it up and down to create a haunting, crying melody. This was the raw, early dawn of the blues. To make these sliding notes work, both the Hawaiian masters and the Delta bluesmen often tuned their strings not to the standard intervals we learn first, but to a full, resonant chord.
But these tunings didn't come out of thin air. Long before the slide, they lived in the quiet parlors of the nineteenth century. If you have ever wondered why your tuner calls Open G Spanish or Open D Vestapol, it is because of two incredibly popular pieces of sheet music from that era. A song called Spanish Fandango was a household hit that required tuning the guitar to a G major chord, and another called The Siege of Sebastopol used an open D major. Ordinary people played these in their living rooms for decades, never knowing their hobby would become the backbone of rock and roll.
It is a story of two islands of sound—the lush, oceanic vibrato of Hawaii and the grit of the American South—meeting in the hollow wooden body of the guitar. They both discovered that when you unbind the strings from their standard patterns, the instrument starts to breathe differently.
Before you move on to your next song, I want you to try something. Tune your guitar to an open chord, strike all six strings at once, and then press the wooden back of the guitar against your chest. Just feel that specific, deep resonance for a moment before you even touch a fret.