Slack Key to Dreadnought: Martin’s Hawaiian Story

Hawaii's guitar story begins not with music but with cattle. In 1793, Captain George Vancouver gifted cattle to King Kamehameha I, who placed a kapu on killing them. By the 1830s the herds had multiplied into a serious nuisance and danger, while the old sandalwood economy was fading and a new trade in beef, hides and tallow was emerging.

Kamehameha III's solution, around 1832, was to hire Mexican and Spanish vaqueros from California to teach Hawaiians how to handle cattle: roping, riding, breeding, curing hides. They also brought guitars.

The Hawaiians who learned from them became paniolo — a Hawaiianisation of español — and the working cowboy culture that grew up around Waimea and on Maui pre-dated the American Wild West by decades. The vaqueros stayed a few years, taught what they knew, and went home. Some left their guitars behind.

What they inherited did not come with standard tuning. There is a persistent tradition that, with no one left who knew how to set the strings to E-A-D-G-B-E, paniolo retuned them by ear — "slacking" strings until an open strum rang out as a major chord. Literal history or origin myth, it captures the essential thing: the guitar arrived without an instruction manual, and Hawaiians made it their own.

Slack Key: A Music Kept in the Family

Slack key — kī hōʻalu, literally "loosen the key" — is the fingerstyle tradition that grew out of it. The strings are tuned down so an open strum produces a major chord; the thumb walks an alternating bass while the fingers carry melody on the top three strings. The most common tuning is Taro Patch — D-G-D-G-B-D, an open G. Wahine tunings add a major seventh; Mauna Loa tunings space the top two strings a fifth apart. George Winston, who founded the Dancing Cat slack key label, catalogued around fifty tunings; some belong to a single song, or a single player.

For most of its first century, slack key was private music — played on the lanai at day's end, at family gatherings, around the campfire once the cattle were settled. Tunings were guarded as family secrets; a father might detune the guitar the moment his children appeared. The colonial period made it worse: Hawaiian-medium education was banned in 1896, the language was discouraged, hula was pushed to the margins or repackaged for outsiders, and indigenous traditions were forced out of much public life. Slack key survived by going quiet.

But it was only one branch of the Hawaiian guitar tradition. The other would have a far larger commercial impact — and it was the invention of a single person.

Joseph Kekuku and the Steel Guitar

Joseph Kekuku was born in Lā'ie on Oahu in 1874 or 1875. In 1885, aged about eleven, he was walking with his guitar when — in the best-known version of the story — he picked up a piece of metal, sometimes remembered as a railway spike, sometimes a bolt, comb, or knife, and slid it along the strings. The sound that came out — sustained, vocal, gliding between pitches with none of the steps of frets — captivated him. He spent the next several years perfecting the technique at the Kamehameha School for Boys in Honolulu: guitar flat across the lap, open tuning, a polished steel bar in the left hand, picked with the right.

The technique depended on the new availability of steel strings, which sustained the bar's pressure where gut strings could not. The instrument needed no redesign at first — any Spanish guitar could be played "Hawaiian style" if you raised the nut to lift the strings clear of the frets and tuned to an open chord.

Kekuku left Hawaii in 1904 and never returned. He toured American vaudeville, spent eight years in Europe with the Bird of Paradise show, taught in Chicago, and died in Dover, New Jersey, in 1932; he was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in 1993. The instrument he created became the sound of Hawaiian music to the outside world, and spread from there into country, blues, gospel, Western swing and ultimately rock and roll. W.C. Handy recalled seeing a guitarist press a knife to the strings in 1903, in a manner he credited to Hawaiian players; Son House cited the influence directly. The bottleneck blues slide and the Nashville pedal steel are both, by reasonable lineage, Kekuku's grandchildren.

The Craze That Swept America

Hawaiian music had been trickling onto the mainland since the 1890s. In 1899 the steel guitarist July Paka took a Hawaiian band to San Francisco to cut what are usually counted as the first Hawaiian recordings for Edison — now lost — and Toots Paka's Hawaiians went on to work the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, setting the format that stuck: lead steel guitar, rhythm Spanish guitar, ukulele. Columbia issued an early "Aloha Oe" cylinder in 1901, and by the early 1910s the labels were recording the Hawaiian songbook in earnest.

The tipping point was the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Hawaii's pavilion — promoting tourism seriously for the first time — put live steel guitar and ukulele in front of enormous mainland audiences, and within months the craze was on. In 1916, 78 rpm records featuring Hawaiian steel guitar outsold every other genre in the United States. Ukuleles, hula numbers, Hawaiian songs by the dozen — much of the popular image of "Hawaii" that mainlanders still carry was set in place in those few years either side of 1915.

The craze ran into the late 1920s, dimmed through the Depression, and flickered back in a 1940s and early-50s revival, driven by servicemen returning from Pacific postings and Arthur Godfrey's ukulele evangelism on television. By the 1970s the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance rescued slack key but never restored the steel guitar to its old commercial centrality; by then the steel had migrated permanently into country music, where it remains.

Martin Enters the Picture

The Martin Guitar Company was founded in 1833 by Christian Friedrich Martin, a German luthier who had been shop foreman for Johann Stauffer in Vienna. For its first eighty years it built parlour-sized gut-string guitars in Nazareth, Pennsylvania — no reason on earth to have anything to do with the Pacific.

Martin's first ukulele came in 1907, at the request of the Oliver Ditson Company of Boston. It was a failure: built like a miniature guitar — spruce top, heavy bracing — it came out overbuilt and lifeless, missing the percussive bounce that defines a real uke. They put it away.

In 1915, with the exposition having lit the fuse and demand climbing fast, Ditson asked again. This time Martin studied authentic Nunes-style ukuleles, went much lighter, switched to mahogany tops, and got it right. Martin made its first successful ukuleles in late 1915, and by 1916 the line had developed into Soprano Styles 1, 2 and 3 — the shape that would define the Martin ukulele for the next seventy-five years — along with eight-string Taropatch models.

The financial impact is generally underappreciated. Between 1916 and 1926 Martin built fewer than 17,000 guitars and nearly 57,000 ukuleles; in 1926 alone it built over 14,000 of them. In Martin's own historical account, the guitar may have remained the "heart" of the company, but ukuleles were paying the bills. The factory expansions of those years were paid for by ukuleles, and the cushion that carried Martin through the Depression was a ukulele cushion. When uke sales fell off in the late 1920s, Martin had the space and surplus to lean into guitars instead — and the dreadnought era of the 1930s followed.

Without the Hawaiian craze, Martin's route to the modern steel-string flat-top — and especially the dreadnought era — would almost certainly have looked very different.

Koa: The Wood That Carries the Sound

In 1919 Martin added Hawaiian koa as an option across Styles 1, 2 and 3, marking the wood with a "K" suffix: a Style 1 in koa became a 1K. The koa instruments were dimensionally identical to the mahogany versions; only the wood changed.

Acacia koa grows only in the Hawaiian islands — dense, golden to red-brown, often spectacularly figured with curl or flame, acoustically bright and lively. Every serious Hawaiian-made ukulele from the Nunes shops onward used it, and Martin's koa ukes were at once a tribute to that tradition and an obvious play to the Hawaiian fashion.

The hierarchy ran from plain to extraordinary: Style 0 (introduced late 1921, mahogany only, and Martin's best-selling instrument ever), Style 1/1K (entry koa, simple binding), Style 2/2K (ivoroid binding front and back), Style 3/3K (pro-grade, fancier inlay, fretboard running to the soundhole), and the Style 5K (introduced 1922, top of the range, all-koa, abalone pearl encrusting the headstock, body binding, rosette and fingerboard). The 5K retailed for $50 in 1922 — an enormous price for a ukulele. It never sold in numbers, but it made Martin's name as the maker of the finest ukulele in the world.

Koa uke production peaked in the 1920s and tapered through the 1930s; the 2K ended in 1933 and the 3K in 1938. As koa supplies tightened in the late 1930s, the Style 5K was dropped in 1941, and by the end of World War II all koa ukulele models had been discontinued — almost certainly because Hawaiian koa was no longer easily obtainable. A vintage 5K today is the holy grail of Martin ukulele collecting, and even the lesser koa models command serious money over their mahogany contemporaries, simply because so few were made.

Hawaiian Guitars and the Birth of the Dreadnought

The koa story did not stop at ukuleles. In April 1916 Martin shipped its first Hawaiian-styled guitars to the Oliver Ditson Company of New York; that July it sent six samples each of three koa-bodied models — broadly the 0-18, 0-21 and 00-28 in trim — to the Southern California Music Company of Los Angeles. These were among the very first Martins built for steel strings and, oddly for Martin, fan-braced rather than X-braced. They were built for the Hawaiian player — a high nut to lift the strings off the frets for lap-style steel — though catalogued as convertible: "steel strings and nut adjuster for Hawaiian playing. Suitable for regular playing with nut adjuster removed."

Of all the threads that link Hawaii to Martin, this is the one that matters most to the shape of the modern guitar.

In early 1916 the Hawaiian bandleader Major Kealakai, touring the mainland and finding his guitar not loud enough for the larger venues, ordered a custom instrument from Martin through Ditson. He wanted a much bigger body — a 12-fret, slotted-headstock guitar, extra-deep and broad-waisted, fan-braced, set up for steel strings and Hawaiian playing. Martin built it: effectively a 0000-size guitar of unusual depth, made expressly for a Hawaiian musician's need for stage volume.

Shortly after, Ditson commissioned a related design — a new pear-shaped, large-bodied, deep steel-string guitar with the same resonant projection Kealakai had asked for. They needed a name. Borrowing from the British battleship class then in the news, they called it the dreadnought.

The first Ditson dreadnoughts of 1916-17 had 12-fret necks, slotted headstocks, fan bracing and a far wider waist than today's. They did not sell, and the model went quiet through the 1920s. In 1931 Martin reintroduced it under its own name with critical changes: 14-fret neck, solid headstock, X-bracing, narrower waist. The D-1 and D-2 — soon redesignated D-18 and D-28 — became the template for the modern dreadnought, the most influential acoustic design of the twentieth century.

The line runs directly from a Hawaiian bandleader's need for stage volume in 1916 to the D-28 that hangs in nearly every serious player's arsenal today.

The O'ahu HG-28: The Story Comes Full Circle

In 2024, Martin launched the O'ahu HG-28 as part of a renewed telling of Hawaiian music's importance to the company's history. The company's own ledgers make the point plainly: the Hawaiian craze of the 1910s and '20s helped Martin expand, survive, and move toward the steel-string flat-top guitars that would define its Golden Era.

It is the company's tribute to that period — an instrument that honours the Hawaiian tradition which carried Martin through, and helped shape the modern steel-string guitar.

The HG-28 is best described as a smaller 14-fret sloped-shoulder dreadnought with the depth of a 000 — dreadnought tone in a more comfortable size. The top is solid spruce; the back and sides are solid flamed Hawaiian koa, the same wood that defined Martin's finest ukuleles of the 1920s and has carried Hawaiian sound for two centuries. It is finished with scalloped X-bracing, a short-scale satin neck in a Golden Era modified low oval profile, bold herringbone trim and antique white binding that nods to Martin's early Hawaiian-style guitars, and the figure of the koa is left to do the talking.

It plays easily, with low action, and feels at home in standard tuning or in any number of slack key open tunings — open G chief among them. The line that began at a paniolo campfire runs all the way to here: a koa-bodied Martin you can pick up and play in the very tuning those cowboys arrived at by ear.

We have the O'ahu HG-28 in the shop now, ready to play. If you'd like to hear it, hold it, and feel the weight of that history in your hands, come and spend some time with it.

Martin Ukuleles at Studio 1

Martin's relationship with the ukulele has continued in fits and starts since the golden years of the 1920s — a 1950s spike as servicemen came home, a long quiet stretch, and a more serious revival from 2008 with new Style 3 models in mahogany, koa and cherry. In 2013 Martin issued the 1T IZ in honour of Israel Kamakawiwo'ole; in 2015-16 it marked the centenary of the original 1916 line.

We currently stock three Martin ukuleles that represent the breadth of that tradition:

Martin T1 StreetMaster (Tenor) — A tenor with an ultra-thin finish that gives it a beautifully weathered look, like an old friend you have played for years. The top, back and sides are all solid mahogany, making it light in the hand and bright in tone. If you play guitar and want to learn the uke, the tenor size makes for a comfortable transition. Martin has built tenor ukuleles since 1929, but nothing quite like this — premier sound, outstanding playability and easy affordability in one gorgeous instrument.

Martin FSC Certified Tenor Ukulele — A mahogany tenor built with Forest Stewardship Council certified tonewoods, pairing Martin's traditional ukulele craft with responsible forestry. For players who want the Martin sound and the knowledge that the wood was sourced sustainably.

Martin Special Edition Concert Ukulele — All Solid Koa — Here the thread back to 1919 becomes literal: an all-solid koa concert uke, a direct descendant of the 1K, 2K and 3K koa ukuleles that funded Martin's factory expansions in the 1920s and carried the company through the Depression. Dense, golden Hawaiian koa, with the bright, lively voice that has defined the ukulele since the Nunes workshops. Play it and you are holding the same tonewood tradition that saved Martin Guitar and made the dreadnought era possible.

There is a deep irony to all of it, as Chris Martin IV has pointed out: koa is harvested in Hawaii, shipped across the Pacific and the continent to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, turned into a ukulele or guitar in a Martin factory, and shipped back to Hawaii to be sold to tourists. But the circle is the point. The guitar arrived in Hawaii by accident, was transformed by necessity, became a craze that reshaped American music, saved a Pennsylvania workshop, and gave birth to the modern acoustic guitar.

Come and Play Them

The Martin O'ahu HG-28 and all three Martin ukuleles are in the shop now, ready to play.

If you'd like to hear the koa sing — on the HG-28 or the all-solid koa concert uke — feel the weight of that Hawaiian tradition in your hands, or simply spend some time with instruments that carry one of the most remarkable origin stories in modern music, drop into the store or reach out to staytuned@studio1.co.nz 

The thread runs from Mexican cowboys to an 11-year-old boy with a railway spike to a Pennsylvania workshop, and finally into your hands. Come and hear it for yourself.