I’m not referring to an electric steel guitar, but an acoustic resonator, or resophonic guitar, played lap style. The Dobro is a staple of bluegrass, and is prominent in older country. You hear it in other styles too sometimes.
The best answer I can think of is “Looking Out My Back Door” by CCR. I know there is some uncertainty as to what constitutes ‘prominently’ - the solo is on a regular (electric) guitar, but the Dobro is an important part of the sound.
Do Danelctro guitars count? Jimmy Page used one for “White Summer/Black Mountain Side”
[del]Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms. Right there on the front cover. Doesn’t get more prominent than that.[/del]
Man of Constant Sorrow from the “O Brother Where Art Thou” soundtrack.
The main riff on Beck’s I’m a Loser sounds Dobro-ish.
Hard to imagine any song more prominent than the CCR song.
I’m not sure, but the guitar sounds like a wooden flat top (as opposed to a resonator), and the part played on it sounds like a bottleneck slide (i.e., upright, not lap style).
Does Lynyrd Skynyrd’s *The Ballad of Curtis Loew *feature a Dobro? The titular character plays one, but I don’t know if the same can be said for any of the band members.
I would agree.
Just to clarify, my use of ‘prominently’ refers to how prominent a part the Dobro plays in the song. There might be some very famous songs with a Dobro buried down in the mix, practically inaudible. But LOMBD wouldn’t be the same without it.
If the OP is referring to resonator guitars in general, a National is as appropriate as a Dobro. Knopfler certainly plays a resonator in concert, and I imagine he played one on that album.
That’s probably the winner. But Rory Gallagher was big in Europe in the 1970’s and he was another one who regularly pulled out a resonator guitar for acoustic sets.
Does anything by Alison Krauss + Union Station count?
especially:
When Papa Played The Dobro
Covered by many artists. Johnny Cash did a good job with it.
you can see the Dobro played in this one
Page used a Danelectro, but it was a regular Dano, not a resonator. Also, not slide.
Calling them “Dobro” is wrong, Dobro is a brand name, and Dobros are only one subset of resonator designs.
Call them resonator guitars, resonators, or resos, which is what most of us folks who play them call them.
What about the Kinks and Lola? It was a steel guitar style dobro and not a lap guitar. Does that count?
I always thought it was a dobro during the intro to Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” but I could be wrong.
I remember seeing Clapton playing a dobro in a good chunk of his unplugged album.
I think Soundgarden’s “Burden In My Hand” has a resonator strumming the main chords. Tons of other guitars on that recording, but if you listen closely, the resonator plays all the way through the tune.
It’s certainly possible that’s what they used, though of course what it is supposed to be is an acoustic guitar being heard through a crappy little mono radio speaker (you can hear the stations being tuned just before the tune starts).