The 10 best songs featuring slide guitar
Over the 20th century, guitar technology came on in leaps and bounds. Electrification allowed for louder concerts and recording apparatus, but crucially, it unleashed a galaxy of sound manipulation ideas. The century began with wooden-bodied acoustic guitars but finished with solid bodies, synthesisers, and pedals for just about anything, from delay to distortion. While mind-bending technology could make some pretty interesting sounds, it’s quite staggering what could be done with a simple bottleneck or a copper pipe.
Traditionally, guitar strings are plucked or strummed, but by sliding a hard, smooth object across the strings, one can bring a whole new dimension to the vibrations. Slides allow a guitarist to produce a broader range of glissando effects and deeper vibratos.
Music created using some form of slide tool has been traced back to African stringed instruments long before modern six-string guitars were around. Early usage has also been tracked back to Joseph Kekuku, the Hawaiian man responsible for inventing the steel guitar.
In the early 20th century, C.S. DeLano, publisher of Hawaiian Music In Los Angeles, wrote ‘Hawaiian Love Song’, the first original composition written for the Hawaiian Steel Guitar.
In a 1932 article, DeLano wrote: “Joseph told me that he was walking along a road in Honolulu forty-two years ago, holding an old Spanish guitar, when he saw a rusty bolt on the ground. As he picked it up, the bolt accidentally vibrated one of the strings and produced a new tone that was rather pleasing. After practising for a time with the metal bolt, Joe experimented with the back of a pocket knife, then with the back of a steel comb, and still later on with a highly-polished steel [bar] very similar to the sort that is used today.”
Meanwhile, a similar style was undertaken by blues musicians of the Mississippi Delta, namely Muddy Waters, Earl Hooker and Elmore James. These blues guitarists popularised the bottleneck slide guitar style, and country blues pioneer Sylvester Weaver is widely credited as the first musician to record slide music with ‘Guitar Blues’ in 1923.
Over the decades, slide guitar has been employed across multiple genres, especially in the realm of blues-derived rock music. Today, we look to celebrate the style with our top ten songs to feature slide guitar. Follow the playlist below.
The 10 best songs featuring slide guitar
Beck – ‘Loser’
When considering slide music from after the blues-rock explosion of the ’50s to ’70s, Beck’s ‘Loser’ is always the first to come to mind. The iconic riff that kicks the song off and texturises it throughout is a simple jab on the low strings in a drop D tuning, but my word is it effective! The 1993 release remains Beck’s most beloved and instantly recognisable hit.
“I’d be banging away on a Son House tune, and the whole audience would be talking, so maybe out of desperation or boredom, or the audience’s boredom, I’d make up these ridiculous songs just to see if people were listening,” Beck once said of the song’s inception. “‘Loser’ was an extension of that.”
The Rolling Stones – ‘No Expectations’
As astute blues disciples, The Rolling Stones were no strangers to slide guitar riffs. Their oeuvre is chock full of slide, from the early blues covers through the Mick Taylor years to the more modern creations of Ronnie Wood. Today I’m picking out what I deem to be one of the most beautifully memorable slide songs for the Stones. ‘No Expectations’ appeared on the 1968 album Beggars Banquet as one of Brian Jones’ last contributions before his expulsion and death.
“That’s Brian playing [the slide guitar],” Mick Jagger recalled in a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone. “We were sitting around in a circle on the floor, singing and playing, recording with open mikes. That was the last time I remember Brian really being totally involved in something that was really worth doing.”
Mazzy Star – ‘Fade Into You’
If this list was for “the best slide guitar riffs,” perhaps Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade Into You’ wouldn’t appear. In an effort to cool the heads of old-school blues fanatics and slide pedants, this is a list of the best songs to feature slide guitar riffs. The late David Roback’s perfect slide solo in the song is by no means complex and ubiquitous as in some over-texturised prog-rock songs, but it didn’t need to be.
Less is often more in music, and in the case of creating a dreamy, neo-psychedelic or paisley underground sound, silence can be your friend. As Hope Sandoval’s voice trades places with ethereal guitar runs, the deafening silence they cut is as integral to the hair-raising effect as the sounds themselves.
George Harrison – ‘If Not for You’
As The Beatles’ lead guitarist and frustrated, sidelined songwriter, George Harrison was full of ideas upon his solo liberation in the early 1970s. Harrison’s interest in strings brought him under the mentorship of sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar and into a spiralling ukelele-collecting habit. Naturally, his string addiction brought lots of enjoyable, guitar-dense material for us to enjoy.
In 1968, when The Beatles’ were recording ‘Hey Jude’, Harrison was famously snubbed by Paul McCartney after suggesting an answering guitar lick after each line of the track. When recording material for his first post-Beatles solo release, All Things Must Pass, Harrison certainly didn’t hold back. The album is full of wonderful slide riffs I could have picked, but the Bob Dylan cover, ‘If Not for You’, just does some extraordinary things to the ears.
The White Stripes – ‘Little Bird’
Detroit duo The White Stripes emerged as quite the phenomenon in the early 2000s. The couple, consisting of multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Jack White and drummer and vocalist Meg White, generated a remarkable amount of sound for their limited membership. In my youth, I remember hearing the band on the radio for the first time and being blown away by the fresh garage revival sound.
The White Stripes created a healthy variety of music, from stadium stompers like ‘Icky Thump’ to demure ditties like ‘We’re Going to Be Friends’. All the while, Jack White used various instruments and effect pedals to achieve his sounds. One of his closest allies was the slide, and he used it to profuse perfection in 2000’s ‘Little Bird’.
Oasis – ‘Fade In-Out’
After Oasis’ first two albums, Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, the Gallagher brothers were blamed for becoming indulgent and creating progressively disappointing anthemic Britpop-hangover fodder. While I agree with this sentiment to a degree, the band’s latter albums contained some highly enjoyable hits, and I would say the major drop-off came after 1998’s Be Here Now.
Be Here Now is widely remembered for stand-out hits like ‘Stand By Me’ and ‘All Around The World’, but for me, it’s all about the soaring guitar-dense track, ‘Fade In-Out’. The Gallagher brothers became close with British model Kate Moss and her boyfriend Johnny Depp in the late 1990s. During one of the Be Here Now sessions, Noel was allegedly too drunk to play the guitar, so Depp stepped in to record the brilliant slide sections in his stead.
Pavement – ‘Father to a Sister of Thought’
Pavement, California’s most underappreciated indie group of the 1990s, liked to lay low with a cult following, signing exclusively to independent labels. The band’s output was mostly steered by frontman Stephen Malkmus, who brought a healthy variety of influences to the fore, adding his inspired lyrics to finalise that unique Pavement sound.
Pavement’s output brought intriguing twists and turns, from their raw earlier material to the latter, more polished music. In the middle of their initial run over the ’90s came Wowee Zowee, arguably the band’s greatest LP, bar Slanted and Enchanted. ‘Father to a Sister of Thought’ is an essential of the Pavement canon, and I’m forever thankful for the inclusion of slide guitar.
Bob Dylan – ‘Meet Me in the Morning’
Bob Dylan’s most important and successful run through the mid-1960s was proceeded by a dry patch, remedied by 1974’s Planet Waves. A year later, Dylan smashed it out of the park with one of his most enduring LPs of all time, Blood on the Tracks. For the first time in several years, the greatest songwriter of the century had brought us a faultless album.
Side two of this delicious record kicks off with the effortlessly suave ‘Meet Me in the Morning’, a classic blues construction enhanced by smooth slide guitar licks. While this track just about takes the top spot in Dylan’s catalogue as far as sliding is concerned, ‘If Not for You’, which was more famously covered by George Harrison (see above), deserves mention.
Muddy Waters – ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’
One of the greatest gifts to modern music, especially rock, was the blues. Muddy Waters embodies the genre’s roots that many look back to when we hear the genre mentioned. His pioneering electric style spearheaded the Chicago Blues scene in the mid-20th century and earned him the title of ‘The Father Of Modern Chicago Blues’.
Waters’ ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’ remains one of the greatest examples of classic blues slide guitar. It certainly left its mark on Brian Jones and his fellow The Rolling Stones, who covered the track on 1965’s The Rolling Stones No. 2.
J.J. Cale – ‘Crazy Mama’
J.J. Cale is one of the true unsung heroes of rock music of the 20th century. His inventive virtuosity and songwriting ability went widely underappreciated because he “was always a background person. It took me a while to adjust to the fact that people were looking at me ’cause I always just wanted to be part of the show. I didn’t want to be the show,” as he once admitted To Tulsa and Back: On Tour.
Thankfully, Cale’s genius has been recognised by fellow celebrated guitarists, especially Eric Clapton, who described him as “one of the most important artists in the history of rock” in a 2014 conversation with The Telegraph.
“I was tired of gymnastic guitar playing, and when I listened to J.J. Cale records, I was impressed by the subtlety, by what wasn’t being played,” wrote in his autobiography of the late legend. Cale used slide guitar on many of his enduring songs. Most famously throughout his biggest hit, ‘After Midnight’. Today, however, I bring your attention to another song from his 1972 album, Naturally. In ‘Crazy Mama’, Cale’s delicate use of slide elevates this wonderful blues tune to a state of nirvana.
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