Anthony Lis, Professor emeritus in the School of Performing Arts at South Dakota State University, is currently working on a book-draft covering the run-up to the invention of the pedal steel guitar which will prominently-feature the Harlin Brothers and Jay D. Harlin’s invention of the Multi-Kord pedal steel guitar. (Lis has described the latter as “the first truly commercially successful pedal steel guitar.”) 

In preparation for writing his draft, Lis conducted formal interviews and/or conversed with several people with close ties to the Harlins, including Jay Harlin’s younger daughter Beth, two former students of the Harlin Brothers who eventually worked as teachers themselves for the company, and the late Indianapolis standard-guitarist-and-steel-guitarist Louis Urbancic. Urbancic played one of Jay Harlin’s pedal steel guitar prototypes while gigging as a young man at La Rue’s Supper Club (located where modern-day Interstate 65 crosses over Pennsylvania Street in the northern part of downtown Indianapolis); he also played a commercially-produced Harlin Brothers Multi-Kord in the band backing TV-show host Denny Dutton on WFBM-TV (now WRTV), which also appeared at La Rue’s.

The sections of Lis’s book-draft detailing the Harlin Brothers will be the culmination of previous research-work he has conducted regarding the siblings. In the mid-to-late 2010’s, Lis assembled a series of articles for the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Association Quarterly  covering the Harlin brothers’ arrival in Indianapolis in the early 1930s through Jay Harlin’s creation of his two pedal steel guitar prototypes by sometime in 1941.

In June 2018, Lis gave the presentation “Kalina Boogie: Jay Harlin of Indianapolis and the Birth of the Pedal Steel Guitar” at the 35th Annual International Country Music Conference in Nashville. (Lis’s presentation took its title from a lively instrumental composed in the late 1940s by Jay Harlin, which subsequently became one of roughly twenty recordings made by the Harlins for their own Kalina/Crossroads label beginning around 1950.) Lis’s presentation included performance-photos of young Jay with his older brother Herb in the early 1930s, as well as shots of the early Harlin Brothers quintet from the mid-1930s. Lis also displayed eleven covers of the numerous “orchestrations for Hawaiian guitar” the Harlins produced through the years, encompassing Stephen Foster songs, Nineteenth Century parlor songs, western folk songs, and the like. Lis’s presentation also included several excerpts from Jay Harlin’s August 1947 patent for the pedal steel guitar that became the Multi-Kord.