From this angle, there’s a great contrast between the proper Victorian guitarist
and the high-energy Nancy Wilson.

When I started my internship with the Eiteljorg's curatorial department last August, I was looking forward to learning more about the curatorial process by working on Guitars! Roundups to Rockers.  Now, looking back on these past months, I’ve not only received quite an education on guitars and 20th century popular music, but also gained valuable practical experience.

One of the main things I’ve learned is that creating an exhibit is truly a collaborative effort.  Besides all the work the Eiteljorg staff put in to creating and publicizing the exhibit, there were many outside collectors and institutions that we depended on to even have an exhibit in the first place!   While the curators were working out loan agreements for the great selection of guitars on display, I was busy tracking down images to illustrate them.

You might be aware of all of the digitization efforts many archives and libraries have gone through in past years to put collections online.  As a history student, it was fun to go through the online photo collections of institutions like the Denver Public Library or Los Angeles Public Library searching for people playing guitars.  (I encourage browsing through historical photos; you never know what you’ll run across).  Through these databases we were able to find many of the photographs you’ll find in the exhibit. 

Each of the images on this label came from a different source.

However, tracking down photographs of specific musicians playing the guitars on display could be more difficult, especially keeping our budget in mind.  I enjoyed talking with various archivists and photographers, both amateur and professional, across the country on the search for fitting images.  Even CD covers and advertisements could help tell the story of Western guitarists.  Photo acquisition had its share of obstacles with image sizes and delayed orders, but in the end, everything managed to come together.

(Left- Chris Knutsen Harp Guitar, 1898-1900, Loan courtesy of the National Music Museum at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion)
(Right - The Knutsen Family, 1900, Courtesy of the Jefferson County Historical Society – Port Townsend, Washington)

What I most like about the images we ended up choosing though is that they place the guitars in context.  I can imagine Chris Knutsen and his wife playing duets on harp guitar, the electric energy of a grunge concert, or a chill moment of strumming to friends on the streets of San Francisco. 

Guitars! photo book

Do you have any favorite images from the exhibit?  As is often the case, many great photos didn’t make the cut to appear on the walls and labels, so make sure you check out the photo books for more! 

Elena Rippel
Eiteljorg curatorial intern
(The guitar Elena's holding is now in the galleries for all to play.)


By the way, you can check out more than 100 guitars—owned by greats including Roy Rogers, Charlie Christian, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Woody Guthrie, Buddy Holly, Les Paul and others—during Guitars! Roundups to Rockers, at The Eiteljorg Museum through August 4. The exhibit explores the Western connections of guitars and artists who have provided the soundtrack for America.  

“It’s one in the morning, and I’m awake, thinking about frybread…”
– from Frybread Dreams, a poem by Richard Walker

If you’ve ever been to any Native American event, you’re probably familiar with fry bread. If you’ve never tasted it, you are truly missing out. Fry bread is just what its name implies… dough that is fried in oil to create a puffy, delicious bread. Fry bread can be a sweet treat or the foundation of “Indian tacos,” topped with ground beef, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes and salsa/chile.

Every year at Indian Market and Festival, people happily wait in line at the Indian taco truck (rain or shine) for their fry bread fix. It’s so popular; the Eiteljorg staff looks forward to it each year as one of the highlights of the whole event.

Most of us agree that fry bread is super tasty. But the fuss over fry bread isn’t just about taste. It’s about history, tradition, survival and love.

According to Frybread by Jen Miller (Smithsonian Magazine, July 2008), the origins of fry bread date back to 1864 and the Long Walk of the Diné (Navajo), when the U.S. government forcibly relocated thousands of Native Americans from their lands in Arizona to New Mexico. Removed from their traditional sources of food, the Diné had to rely on meager government rations. Many died of starvation. Fry bread was a food of survival, created from a few simple ingredients that the Diné had access to: flour, lard, baking powder, salt, water and powdered milk. For many Native Americans fry bread is a reminder of the conditions their ancestors endured, and how they created something from nothing to live another day.

Many foods evoke strong feelings and memories, but you would be hard-pressed to find a better example than fry bread. Fry bread fans have created facebook pages, websites, poems, stories and cooking competitions. Most agree that love is a critical ingredient. How else would you turn rations and suffering into a food of survival and celebration?

Fry bread is loved, but it has also been criticized. In an article in Indian Country Today, Suzan Shown Harjo railed against fry bread for the sorrowful history it represents, for its high calorie count, and for being a poor substitution for many other traditional Native American breads. Despite calories and history, however, Native America is still a strong supporter of fry bread, mockumentary film dedicated to it.

Either in spite of its difficult history or because of it, the lines in front of the fry bread truck, during the Eiteljorg's Indian Market & Festival June 22 and 23, will continue to form this summer. No Native American gathering would be the same without it. 

Claire Quimby
Eiteljorg festival and markets intern

Throughout the run of Guitars!Roundups to Rockers, we’ll highlight the top five guitar picks from an Eiteljorg employee and find out whether there’s a Western connection! This week’s playlist comes from Matt Askren, visitor experience manager for the Eiteljorg Museum. 

Matt playing guitar in Rooms live at the Melody Inn (with bassist Andrew Greenburg and drummer Ben Traub.)

Being a (hack of a) musician, I suspect I hear music a bit differently than the average listener. While a good vocal melody is important, it’s the music behind it which spurs my love for a song. In my favorite five picks, note that the drums are as integral to these selections as the guitars.     

1. Message In A Bottle- The Police
2. Cassavettes- Fugazi
3. Still Ill-The Smiths
4. Jimi Hendrix - All Along the Watchtower
5. Pele- Long Fin Killie

Message In A Bottle- The Police

Journeyman guitarist Andy Summers 10 years of playing soul, rock, and jazz fusion made for an interesting blend when punk hit and The Police formed. Summers’ joined the simpler punk style with a rich jazz-informed sense of harmony which helped him create the verse riff for Message. If you have any background in music, he’s playing a series of 9^th chords. I’ve ripped that off the 9^th chord plenty over the years- with distortion it sounds like a warm knife! Also, of note is drummer Stewart Copeland’s beats- fantastic hi-hat work!

Summers was my first guitar hero. Coincidentally, my main guitar is a Fender Telecaster with a humbucker in the neck position- same as Summers.

Cassavettes- Fugazi
When I began playing guitar, bands blending punk and classic rock were all the rage. That movement had developed in the independent underground before it broke. Fugazi were the quintessential post-punk band.

One of Fugazi’s two singer/guitarists, Ian MacKaye, was the poster-boy of the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic . He was co-founder of D.C.’s independent Dischord Records, frontman for the straight-edge punk band Minor Threat and later was founder of Fugazi, a more experimental post-punk band. This song celebrates the individual creativity that goes with a DIY entrepreneurial spirit- specifically the work of independent film maker John Cassavettes.  The first riff includes a guitar imitating a siren which mirrors the singer/guitarist Guy Picciotto’s  alarm upon watching a Cassavettes film. When the verse arrives, the guitars crash in with the coolest noise junk-guitar riff of all-time. Clearly, this isn’t the status-quo method of playing guitar- and that’s the point! DIY means among other things, act. Don’t wait, create!  Also of note is the call-and-response guitar work in the bridge riff at 1:47- very cool! Like many musicians with a background in indie and post-punk, I’ve ripped off plenty from Fugazi! 

Still Ill – The Smiths
The punk-informed Smiths brought a more sophisticated pop-oriented sound to the scene than most punk influenced bands of the time. Singer Morrissey was a master of brash, often hilarious, hyperbole and melodrama. Is this song a commentary on the biology of sexual orientation, or a critique of the Thatcher administration?  I don’t know.  But what’s important here is how awesome the guitar is! Guitarist Johnny Marr is a master of coming up with colorful guitar parts and this syncopated verse riff doesn’t disappoint. However, his choice of burying it in the mix may be a challenge though as you’ll need to squint your ears to hear it.

Fragment of a Sunburst Fender Stratocaster
electric guitar formerly owned by Jimi Hendrix.
(Photo courtesy of EMP Museum, Seattle, WA)

You can check out Jimi Hendrix’s Gibson Les Paul custom guitar and the remains of his Sunburst Fender Stratocaster in our Guitars! Roundups to Rockers exhibit through August 4.    

Pele- Long Fin Killie
Scotland’s little-known Long Fin Killie once again proved that innovation bubbles up from the underground as guitarist Phil Cameron exclusively used ringing-bell guitar harmonics for the atmospheric verses of Pele. Sadly, this 90’s band’s distinctive blend of percussive indie rock guitar, non-traditional use of world music instruments, drum-and-bass informed rhythms and singer Luke Sutherland’s uniquely poetic gay African-Scot perspective never got above the water table of the underground. Sutherland went on to form the band Bows and has since written 3 somewhat acclaimed novels. Numerous interweb searches have not revealed the what-abouts of guitarist Cameron.

And their Western connections?
Andy Summers played a California made Fender guitar. Hendrix is from Seattle. Fugazi influenced plenty of Western bands including Rage Against The Machine and Pearl Jam. Long Fin Killie were influenced by the soft-loud approach of Seattle’s Nirvana. Johnny Marr influenced, and later played in, Washington State’s Modest Mouse.

Matt Askren

(Matthew Askren is the Eiteljorg’s Visitor Experience Manager. He also plays guitar and sings in the band Rooms.)

(Above) Fender Stratocaster, early 1990s, formerly owned by Kurt Cobain; Courtesy EMP Museum, Seattle, WA. See it at the Eiteljorg through Aug. 4.

Mommy blogger, Carrie Kirk, blogs about her personal experience with the Eiteljorg Guitars! Roundups to Rockers exhibit.

I have always had a passion for guitars. Maybe it's because I can't play any string instrument of any kind. Maybe it's just that I enjoy listening to most music. And now that I am a parent, I think it's because I would really, really (really) like for my kids to have a love for music and maybe even play an instrument themselves.

The Eiteljorg Museum recently opened its Guitars! exhibit and experience--a perfect opportunity to introduce my kids to the instrument. The most exciting aspect of this show is that it exposes its audience to an amazing array of music. After you purchase your ticket to the museum, you simply leave proof of identification and pick up your Ipod that plays close to seventy selections of music, ranging from obscure musicians to those who are icons in the music industry.

Since its opening on March 4, I have visited the exhibit twice. Once I drove to the museum sans kids, with latte in my car's cup-holder, listening to The Punch Brothers. That in itself was a great start to my visit. When I entered the gallery, I walked - no, sauntered - through the exhibit, lapping up the music that coincided with the guitars on display and the artists' descriptions and photos. It was late on a Friday afternoon so the museum had fewer visitors to contend with, enabling me to take any route I wanted. If I wanted to move directly from Alvino Rey to George Harrison, I could...and I did. Many of the guitars on display were works of art and hailed from some of the greats - Buddy Holly, Chris Funk of The Decemberists, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and even Jimi Hendrix(Cherokee heritage, BTW). I left the museum charged and anxious to retrieve much of the music I heard on my Spotify account.

Our teenage friend took off with the iPod and quietly traveled through the exhibit. When I peaked in to check on him, I was impressed by so many groups of people (family and friends) experiencing the exhibit together while having an individual experience with the music. Meanwhile the young boys had a heyday with the interactive Guitar Hero in the main hallway. After going through the tutorial, they jammed on the guitars for a good fifteen minutes. Who knows who the winner was since they both believed they each were and argued about it for the next fifteen minutes. Next to Guitar Hero were two large pieces of paper, asking visitors to pen who their actual guitar hero was. Our little friend wrote "Justen Beiber" (sic) and after George determined that Michael Jackson had not played guitar, he scribbled "Will.i.am." (We have to listen to the Beatles more.)

In the gallery, they took turns playing on two guitars, one acoustic and the other electric (It was hooked up to headphones. Good thinking, Eiteljorg.) There were also rock star duds they could try on for the full-effect. They got excited about some of the guitars on display too, especially the unusual ones with various shapes. With our teenage friend anxious to get back to his book, we dragged the boys out, promising to return before the exhibit closes. (Plenty of time since the exhibit runs through August 4.) I am a firm believer in leaving anything while the kids are still happy and wanting more. When they become completely over it, it truly is all over for everyone.

Will my kids be the next George Benson? Probably not. But hopefully with experiences like the one we had at the Eiteljorg, they will come to appreciate the likes of George Benson and when asked ten years from now who their guitar hero is, they may answer Stephen Stills, Carrie Brownstein or Keith Richards - and spell it correctly too.

Carrie Kirk

Carrie Kirk's post was originally posted on Skybluewindow.org - a weekly online publication focused on the arts in central Indiana...and beyond. Each week's issue features original content from a network of professional and student story tellers, including WFYI, Butler University, Franklin College, IUPUI and University of Indianapolis. Thank you Carrie for visiting our amazing exhibit!