The very name slack key guitar suggests laziness. When the Mexicans returned home, the Hawaiians developed their own style of guitar music.
#Slack key guitar how to#
Historians believe that the Mexicans brought with them Spanish-style guitars, taught the Hawaiians the basics of how to play them, and gave guitars to their Hawaiian friends.
![slack key guitar slack key guitar](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NXPLrKNJiTQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
The Hawaiians called these Spanish-speaking cattlemen paniolo, a Hawaiian adaptation of the word español. Mexican cowboys arrived to teach the Hawaiians how to ranch cattle. In a few dozen years the cattle overran the Big Island of Hawaii.
![slack key guitar slack key guitar](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EgrFDzrYvNw/maxresdefault.jpg)
To help the cattle thrive, the king enacted a kapu that protected them. The roots of slack key guitar came from British Captain George Vancouver, who gave several Mexican cattle to Hawaiian King Kamehameha I in 1793 and again in 1794. However, beginning in the 1970s slack key guitar emerged from hiding and today people recognize it as an authentic and traditional Hawaiian musical art form. The public strongly identified both of these instruments with Hawaii as a result of recordings and films. In the first half of the twentieth century, slack key guitar played second fiddle to the ukulele and the electrified steel guitar 1.
![slack key guitar slack key guitar](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZB_PWqXrdIg/maxresdefault.jpg)
Hawaiians did not share it with visiting tourists and for a hundred years it was largely unknown outside of Hawaii. Then it spread to the other Hawaiian islands as a private tradition for family and close friends. It grew up on the ranches of the Big Island. Slack key guitar is the secret music of Hawaii.