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This obscure tradition began with a guitarist named Willie Eason, a member of the House of God, Keith Dominion, in Philadelphia. (The Keith Dominion is part of a Holiness movement started by an African-American woman, Mary Magdalena Lewis Tate, in 1903. Three years after her death in 1930, the church split into three denominations: the Keith Dominion, the McLeod Dominion, now called the Jewel, and the Lewis Dominion.) Eason, who taught himself to play the instrument a decade and a half after the first Hawaiian music fad swept the nation, first performed at a service in the late 1930s and was so well received that he took his Gospel Feast Party Band on a tour of other churches. By the 1950s, the steel guitar had become the lead voice in the rousing gospel music of most Keith and Jewel Dominion churches.
Yet it wasn’t until 1997, when the Arhoolie label released the acclaimed compilation Sacred Steel, that the music was widely heard outside the churches. Although Keith and Jewel Dominion churches are located throughout the country, including several in the Chicago area, most are clustered in the southeast, and many are in Florida. That’s where, in 1992, folklorist Robert Stone ran across a music-store owner who mentioned that he had a lot of black customers asking for steel-guitar supplies.
“A few months ago somebody in our congregation broke out with [R. Kelly’s hit] ‘I Believe I Can Fly’ and we had to pick it up and go with it,” Chuck adds. “But we’ve found a similar reaction, a feeling of sharing, from secular audiences. It may not be in the tradition of the church or in a religious setting, but we realized that people have a lot of natural spirit and I think they can feel that from us.”
