South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Pedal steel finds renewal in unexpected places
Recent recordings outside of country genre showcasing complex instrument
When DaShawn Hickman was 4 years old, living just 32 steps from the tiny granite House of God church in Mount Airy, North Carolina, he picked up a lap steel his uncle had built for his mother. Stretching the electric guitar across his tiny knees for the first time, using a D-cell battery as his slide, he traced the hymns his mother sang.
Hickman soon graduated to the pedal steel, the lap steel’s Byzantine successor, with as many as 24 strings controlled not only with two hands but also with both feet and knees. A quick study, Hickman was 13 when he began leading services at House of God with his steel/strings, the centerpiece of a centuryold style of Black gospel called sacred steel.
“This instrument is a ministry, a tool to help someone overcome,” Hickman, now 40, said. “Where the human voice can’t fully reach, the pedal steel can.”
In June, Hickman released “Drums, Roots & Steel.” More restrained than many of its sacred steel predecessors, his solo debut is a showcase for the instrument’s emotional breadth, equally capable of prayers for the wounded and paeans for the joyous.
It is one of several recent recordings that suggest that the pedal steel — familiar mostly for the lachrymal textures it has long lent to country music — is finding renewal in unexpected places. As the sound of slick modern country shifts from this large and esoteric accessory, ambient and experimental musicians have tapped it for much the same reason as Hickman’s
sacred steel lineage: its ability to harness and even rival the expressiveness of the voice itself.
“Since its existence, you had to learn how to play one way to get a backing role in some country band,” said Robert Randolph, the son of a New Jersey House of God deacon and minister who came to prominence more than two decades ago when he dared to take his 13-string purple behemoth out of the church. He was soon opening for the Dave Matthews Band at Madison Square Garden. “So it’s an instrument that’s never been fully explored.”
With his boisterous Family Band, Randolph expanded sacred steel’s reach by turbocharging its sound, strings screaming for three hours over soulful marches and Allmansized jams. His sound and style have since mellowed, and he has collaborated with Carlos Santana and Ozzy Osbourne. “Guitar, trumpet, piano, keyboard — they’ve all had 9 million babies,” he continued. “But the pedal steel is so new to so many people, they don’t even know what it is. There
are so many ways to evolve this instrument.”
That evolution is accelerating. Modern steel icon Greg Leisz played on half of Daft Punk’s final album, while the funk band Vulfpeck recently commissioned Los Angeles whiz Rich Hinman to interpret a Bach chorale. Texan Will Van Horn went viral in 2016 for covering Aphex Twin with pedal steel, while Dave Harrington, half of the haute electronic duo Darkside, used it as his compositional tool for Alanis Morissette’s recent meditation album. A new fleet of stirring steel players has emerged, and an 11th volume of the long-running guitar compilation “Imaginational Anthem,” now available, offers a snapshot of the evocative instrument’s intrigue.
“One reason it has taken so long to grow out of the genre it’s been pigeonholed in is because it’s so technically complex, and that complexity has kept a lot of people in the country world,” said Luke Schneider, the Nashville, Tennessee, player who curated the new collection. He detailed
how the knees push levers that bend strings, how the feet trigger pedals that stretch them, how the hands work in constant harmony. “It might be the most difficult instrument in the Western world to learn,” he concluded.
Schneider, 42, once thought he might have to stay in the country world, too. A longtime devotee of ambient music who knew of other Nashville players flirting with experimental sounds, he instead backed singer-songwriter Margo Price in her early country years and later joined the masked musician Orville Peck’s band.
But he then encountered Susan Alcorn, one of the instrument’s rare iconoclasts alongside tinkerer Chas Smith and producer Daniel Lanois. Alcorn’s 2006 album, “And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar,” felt like a pioneer’s sketchbook of exotic places a young player might take the antique. Schneider followed her lead, trying to use the pedal steel’s stature to his advantage.
“You’re literally playing
this instrument with your whole body,” Schneider said. “You have to conjure your feelings, then connect them to your toes, your knees, your fingers, your eyes and your ears. All of that combined can express the voice of a musician in a way few other instruments can.”
Despite the pedal steel’s manual demands, this rush of applications and ideas is a result, in many ways, of digital accessibility. Danish guitarist Maggie Bjorklund, 57, stowed her pedal steel in a closet for two years when she first tried to learn around 2000 because its mechanics proved too difficult, and she knew maybe three men in Denmark who played it. She ultimately flew to Nashville to study with Jeff Newman, a beloved instructor who informed her she had been doing it all wrong.
“I thought I knew a little bit about pedal steel, but he said, ‘You sound like a German hausfrau,’ ” she recalled, laughing. “He ripped all that away from me and gave me the basis I still play.”
Just five years later, New
York guitarist Jonny Lam decided to pursue pedal steel as a way to differentiate himself in a city with a glut of guitarists. He stumbled upon the Steel Guitar Forum, where amateurs building instruments in garages argued with the likes of Buddy Emmons, who had revolutionized the instrument’s design, tuning and sound.
Those cranky older denizens became his gateway, offering a low-stakes way for a Chinese American neophyte to learn the lessons of Nashville. He devoured classic instructional texts and records, but the forums (and now, especially, YouTube) remain founts of inspiration for Lam and younger players, reducing barriers to entry for an expensive and isolating instrument.
“Twenty years ago, I didn’t know what a pedal steel was,” Lam said. “There was this monoculture of white males. But now people are doing quirky things with it online, and different kinds of people are being exposed. That representation matters.”