Six String Nation [Paperback]

I have been following the development of the Six Strinbg Nation guitar for years and found this book did an excellent job of bringing it to life.

SIX STRING NATION is the story of one man's quest to express the nature of his country through the creation of an artifact.

In 1995, Jowi Taylor conceived the idea of a guitar in which each part would derive from some aspect of Canadian history, geography or culture. The guitar, once built, would be taken on tour throughout the country and photographed in the hands of Canadians both famous and obscure.

It took some ten years to bring the project to fruition. This book is the record of the process.

Much of the book deals with the acquisition of the guitar's raw materials, and the sources certainly make a wide sweep across the gamut of Canadiana: wood from the Haida Gwaii Golden Spruce, Wayne Gretsky's hockey stick, and Pierre Trudeau's canoe paddle; copper from the Parliamentary Library roof and gold from Rocket Richard's Stanley Cup ring; stone, bone, horn and antler from the wilds across the country. Almost every one of the guitar's sixty-nine components came from a different source.

The description of the selecting, locating and acquiring of the components is a fascination, and at times a very emotional, one. As I read about the steps necessary to take wood from the Golden Spruce (sacred to the Haida Gwaii First Nation), I found myself pausing at times to wipe the mist from my eyes. It's a powerful story. It seems particularly appropriate that this wood should be used for the guitar's soundboard, since the soundboard is in a sense the instrument's soul, determining the quality of the sound.

The book also contains an interview with George Rizsanyi, the luthier commissioned to actually construct the guitar.

The photographs are an extremely important part of this book. There are shots of the acquisition of some of the raw materials and of the actual construction process. But most importantly, there are photos of Canadians holding and playing the guitar. Some of the people are instantly recognizable, some are identified in captions, but most are simply anonymous, ordinary Canadians like you and me. (I was photographed with the guitar, at the Winnipeg Folk Festival ,but didn't make it into the book.) There are all sorts of poses: some formal, some playful; some actually making music, some merely holding or looking at the guitar, some working it like a fashion accessory. Every time I browse back through the photos, I notice something I hadn't seen before.

But the final impression SIX STRING NATION left me with was simply the passion that Jowi Taylor put into his project. I suppose, in the final analysis this is a love story; a moving tale of a man's love for his country and how that love came to be expressed in music and art.

I read Six String Nation through as soon as I got it, and was pleasantly surprised to see all the great photos of people playing and holding the guitar. Some of them are musicians I have met, so that was a nice connection too. The book and the guitar tell a great story, and I have learned things about this country that I had never heard before. It makes me want to find out more details on some of these fascinating stories.