Got Any Pictures Of Your First Year Playing Lap Steel???

[Terry VunCannon]

I started playing lap steel in 1979 for about a year, & quit. Then got back into it around 2000. Any of you got pictures from your starting days?

[Larry Allen]

Sure wish I had pics ..when I was 14 (1958) I got ahold of a Carvin catalog and ordered the parts to build one. Got the parts and made it in wood shop..played it thru Mom’s little plastic radio.. fun on the farm!!

[Bill Groner]

Sorry, the first time I read the post it didn't have the word playing in the subject title. It read... Got any pictures of your first year of steel??? So my bad, I never played out, but I enjoy seeing pics of the rest of you in your youth. Closest one I have is my Grandson trying his hand at it for the first time.

[Greg Cutshaw]

This is me at age 14 playing a Martin electric guitar. In the background is my Carvin 8 string steel guitar. It came without legs but I added them later with a kit from Carvin.

[Bill Ferguson]

Sorry, I misread the title

[Jerome Hawkes]

I had been dabbling off and on with pedal steel - with little progress - for a while before this, but these were taken the first year I played straight steel. I knew the bar and right hand from psg but knew very little on the fretboard - 2008

I had the great opportunity to play a big theater run one summer with a fantastic old school country band - lots of fun

[Guy Cundell]

Cadell Prison, South Australia, 1984.

[David M Brown]

it's not my first year of steel, but it's awful close.

Me playing a National Waikiki model during a rock gig circa 1976.

I bought that steel a couple years earlier...and still have it!

The song was either "One Way Out" - or "And You and I".

[Marc Muller]

Borrowed a Fender lap steel in 1975, 15 years old after seeing David Lindley with Jackson Browne. No pics but started pedal steel in 1976 with my MSA Semi-Pro in the background that I had just gotten. Funny, just saw Don the acoustic guy in the pic tonight. We were both fumbling the math trying to figure out how many years ago we were in a band together. We both gasped and realized 49 years! Crazy....
2nd picture you can see the MSA in 1979 with the next band I was in.

[David DeLoach]

This 1978 photo was taken in my dorm room at North Texas where I was a jazz guitar student. While in school there I was gigging 5 - 6 nights a week all around DFW in a country band playing guitar and fiddle - and soon lap steel.

You can see my 1955 Gibson BR9 lap steel peaking out from the left in that photo. My mom had called me from our home town about 30 miles away and said, "I was at an estate sale and found this little guitar. I think it might me a toy guitar, but it said Gibson on it and it was only $5 so I bought it." I burned rubber to mom's house to find that lap steel waiting for me. I tuned it to open E because thats what I'd been playing bottle neck slide on for years and I knew my way around that tuning. Played 1 instrumental with it in our set - Steel Guitar Rag. And I played it on some old Hank Williams tunes as well.

That's a 1968 Les Paul Custom and a 1963 Strat (with the finish stripped off). You can barely see my original Mark I Mesa Boogie behind the Strat. The fiddle on the right was a 5 string. The white guitar behind the Les Paul and Strat was a Supro '60. I used it for playing slide, never sat it on my lap. They're all gone, but not forgotten



Here's a photo of the Supro '60 (along with my D-18, 1937 L-7, and 1958 ES-125)

[Jack Hanson]

[Tim Whitlock]

1994 with my 1956 Stringmaster. Still have it:

[Samuel Phillippe]

They didn't have cameras when I started ........been a long time ago.

Sam

[Jerry Berger]

This picture was taken in 1956 when I was eight years old. I'm in the foreground. That was sixty-eight years ago! Apparently, my brother and I hadn't figured out the correct way of placing the guitars on our laps yet.

[HowardR]

[BJ Burbach]

OK, in'72, the D-18 cost $275 and is still great. Sold a LPJR for $350 (dumb, huh?). In '74, ditched the National for a 3 pedal Emmons. Sold that a few years later because my music changed again (dumb, huh?) for a long and winding road but always had some kind of steel in my hand. Now, working on 8 str lap steel and resos.