by Jim Harrington
The origin of slack key guitar, otherwise known as ki ho'alu, stretches back to the 1830s when Mexican and Spanish cowboys came to Hawaii to teach the locals how to handle an overpopulation of cattle. The cowboys brought with them their guitars and entertained the Hawaiians with the new instrument during evenings spent around the campfire. When the cowboys went back to the mainland, some left their guitars with the Hawaiians. But the cowboys didn't really take the time to teach the locals how to play, so the Hawaiians had to figure it out themselves.
Luckily, they got it wrong.
Since there were few guitars, and even fewer people who knew how to play them, the Hawaiians had to develop a way to get a full sound out of each guitar. What they came up with was a new style where the bass and rhythm chords are picked on the three or four lowest-pitched strings with the thumb. The melody is then played on the two or three highest-pitched strings. Using finger techniques such as hammering on and pulling off, the slack key guitarist mimics the yodels and falsettos common in Hawaiian songs.
The new generation of island players incorporated what they learned from the Spanish and Mexican guitarists into their own traditional songs and rhythms. The Hawaiians also devised their own tunings, which were a good deal looser than their mainland counterparts (ki ho'alu translates to "loosen the key"--thus the term, slack key).
The result was a melodic finger-picking style of acoustic guitar playing rooted in traditional Hawaiian music with bits of Mexican, Spanish, Portuguese, American and other European influences tossed into the mix.
Slack key is very individual-oriented, with each performer "slacking" the guitar as desired for particular tunings. The same song done by different guitarists can sound quite different.
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