Moving Musical Tradition Revealed at Florida’s Backus Museum The A.E. Backus Museum and Gallery (Fort Pierce, Florida) presents Tuned to the Spirit: Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community from March 11 to May 8, 2022. The Museum is honored to be debuting the traveling exhibition that highlights more than twenty years of “Sacred Steel” photography by scholar and folklorist Robert L. Stone. The exhibition tells the compelling story through images and music of a unique tradition with a vibrant history. In the late 1930s, two related African American Holiness-Pentecostal churches began incorporating a novel, modern instrument into worship – the electric steel guitar. The churches cite literal interpretations of the Psalms of David as the basis for making loud music and dancing to give God praise. The expressive and energetic music rendered on this new era’s “stringed instrument” soon became essential to the spirited worship services, and generations later became known as “Sacred Steel.”
Robert L. Stone (b. 1944). Willie Eason, St. Petersburg, Florida, 1998. Archival pigment print, 18 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.
31
