recordings of that era were made on a C6 neck (guitar tuned in a C6 chord), sometimes called a "Texas tuning". Using tunings with sixths and ninths became common and identifiable with the steel guitar sound. Modern country music and pedal steel The original idea for adding pedals to a console guitar was simply to push a pedal and change the tuning of all the strings into a different tuning and thus obviate the need for an additional neck, but these early efforts were unsuccessful. Around 1948, Paul Bigsby, a motorcycle shop foreman, designed a pedal system. He put pedals on a rack between the two front legs of a console steel guitar to create the pedal steel guitar. The pedals operated a mechanical linkage to apply tension to raise the pitch of certain strings. In 1953, musician Bud Isaacs used Bigsby's invention to change the pitch of only two of the strings, and was the first to push the pedal while notes were still sounding. When Isaacs first used the setup on the 1956 recording of Webb Pierce's song called "Slowly", he pushed the pedal while playing a chord, so certain notes could be heard bending up from below into the existing chord to harmonize with the other strings, creating a stunning effect which had not been possible with on a lap steel. It was the birth of a new sound that was particularly embraced by fans of country and western music, and it caused a virtual revolution among steel players who wanted to duplicate it. Almost simultaneously, an entire musical subculture took a radical stylistic tack. Even though pedal steel guitars had been available for over a decade before this recording, the instrument emerged as a crucial element in country music after the success of this song. When the lap steel was thus superseded by the pedal steel, the inherent Hawaiian influence was brought into the new sound of country music emerging in Nashville in the 1950s. This sound became associated with American country music for the ensuing several decades. Gospel music In the United States in the 1930s, the steel guitar was introduced into religious music, a tradition called "Sacred Steel". The congregation of the House of God, a branch of an African-American Pentecostal denomination, based primarily in Nashville and Indianapolis, embraced the lap steel guitar. The steel guitar often took the place of an organ and