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The first electric guitar didn't sound anything like this.

It would have been more like...

This is what It would have been more like...

This is what's called steel guitar. Today, it might be most associated with the twang in country music.

But once upon a time, long before the Grand Ole Opry and electric amplification, this modern day stringed instrument

was born on the Pacific Islands of Hawaii. I was very interested in their sound. I loved

their sound, but I only knew of their sound and context of country music for the most part.

My name is John Troutman.

I'm a curator of music at the National Museum of American History.

John's interest in the steel guitar began some 20 years ago.

I was a graduate student at the time in Texas,

writing a book on American Indian dance.

I was also working as a musician in Austin and had recently bought a steel guitar that I'd

found in the attic of a music shop in Tucson, Arizona. This was a pedal steel guitar.

I ended up taking it to gigs throughout Austin when I was playing in different rock bands,

learning on the fly, the fundamentals of the instrument.

Now, at the time in the late 1990s, there was very little information about the steel guitar,

save for a few liner notes on some Hawaiian music compilations.

And it was really the beginning of the internet era, so there weren't a whole lot of opportunities

for studying the history online.

...