Slide Along!

Please note that the rules to this contest have been updated. Please refer to "Slip Slidin' Away?" posted on June 20th for correct rules.
To help (Almost) Everybody Slide, Rykodisc, Dobro, and Dunlap have formed a mighty partnership (actually a loose confederation of phone buddies) to create a contest in which you can try to win a DM 90 Dobro, a Dunlap 220 metal slide, and every one of the four discs in the Slide Guitar series from Rykodisc that will be unleashed to the United States on July 23rd (previously released to Europe on the SkyRanch label).

(Almost) Everybody Slides [RCD 10344]
Everybody Slides [RCD 10345]
Slide Crazy [RCD 10346]
Kaiser/Kimock/Mandel/Roulette's Psychedelic Guitar Circus [RCD 10347]

There will also be a HUNDRED additional winners as Dunlop and Rykodisc are pitching in a whole mess of extra slides and CDs to give away. Come back to this spot in a few weeks and you'll see a track listing for one of the releases. These tracklistings will hold important clues to winning. We will have posted these track listings at our three websites (www.rykodisc.com, www.gibson.net, www.jimdunlop.com). We will also post the rules to the contest at that time.
Before then, to help you slide even easier (or crazier) through life, we thought you might like to read a bit of the history of the slide guitar as perpetuated by the liner notes to SLIDE CRAZY. We have edited them for time, content, and to fit the format of your screen.
THE HISTORY OF SLIDING

Like surfing centuries before, the art of the Slide Guitar originated in Hawaii a little more that 100 years ago. The seed of this invention is attributed to many parents, all of which are equally likely, but the one who is officially recognized is a certain Joseph Kekuku. One evening in 1889 in dormitory C of the Kakehameha College in Honolulu, he accidentally dropped his comb on the strings of his guitar. When picking it up, the comb slid across the strings and the guitar made a sound like a violin. So much for the legend.
However, David M. Kupihea claims that James Hoa, leader of the island's first orchestra, slid not only a comb but also a knife and perfume bottles across his guitar strings as of 1876. A technique inspired by Dutch sailors who play the hummel, a sort of dulcimer, by putting it on their lap and fretting with a small piece of wood. Armine Von Temsky is more for 1880 and the arrival of the "pianolos", cowboys from Spanish Mexico who came to capture the bulls offered by Captain Vancouver to King Kamehameha in 1793, and which had since become prolific, wild and destructive.
As for Charles E. King, also a pupil of the Kamehameha College, he acknowledges Joe Kekuku as the inventor of the "steel bar", a chrome covered brass tube which, even today, remains the most used device amongst slide guitar players, but claims that it was Gabriel Divion, just arrived from India, who was the first to play like this in 1885 in the legendary dormitory C where Kekuku was to drop his comb four years later. An attractive version of the story since it is well known that for a long time in India the gottuvadyam and the vichitra veena have been played by sliding a block of wood over the strings.
The "Slide Crazy" program attempts to present some of these innovators- in actual fact 15 of the best. From Bill Harkleroad, better known as Zoot Horn Rollo, essential guitarist of the no less essential Captain Beefheart (how would you recognize a Beefheart recording if not for his voice and the slide guitar?) to Freddie Roulette, a Chicago bluesman armed with a double neck lap steel Hawaiian guitar and in himself the personification of absolute musical nonsense. From Sonny Sharrock, one of the original crazy free jazz players (from the period of Coltrane, Ayler and Sanders) to Brij Bhushan Kabra who plays classic Indian raga with a slide guitar, thus closing the full circle started by Gabriel Divion.
Perhaps....

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