FEATURE
Six String
Tales from the
A few weeks ago, a curious object landed on
my desk. It was a book, but not any ordinary
one. It was a magical book that spun a tale of
a guitar named Voyageur.
BY GAYLA DRAKE PAUL
PHOTOS BY DOUG NICHOLSON
Nation
don’t go.’ And that was, to me, as honest an
impulse as the impulse of Quebecers to want
to start their own country. The problem was,
between those two impulses, both of which
were equally valid, there was no invitation
for anybody else in the country to say what
Canada meant to them. The entire debate
devolved into Red versus Blue, French versus
English, Quebec versus Ottawa. Well, to me
Canada was much more interesting, much
more diverse, and much more colorful than
that debate allowed.”
Jowi Taylor doesn’t play the guitar himself,
but says he has been addicted to music
since childhood. His 2009 book, Six String
Nation, is in a way autobiographical, except
it’s not his story. It’s the story of his idea to
create a guitar that would sing for an entire
nation, and both story and guitar have
taken on a life of their own. The story has
been unfolding for eleven years now, and
it’s just getting started.
Taylor grew up in Canada, a land teeming with great guitar-slinging songwriters.
It’s a musical place just as much as it’s a
hockey-loving, donut-eating, parka-wearing
place. But most Canadians have grown up
on American music and cultural offerings,
not Canadian ones. Taylor laughs a little
sadly as he says, “There’s no barrier to
English-Canadians buying Britney Spears’
records. It’s part of the same market; our
multi-national record companies are owned
by your multi-national record companies.”
Because US media is so powerful, a lot of
Canadians grow up identifying more with
the States than anywhere else.
Quebec is different. According to Taylor, “In
Quebec you will find that you can sell a million records if you are a Quebec artist. They
have a market that is built in. English-Canada
doesn’t really have that.”
In 1995, the nation endured a culture shock:
Quebec didn’t want to be part of Canada
anymore. “As we were faced with this question of Quebec leaving,” Taylor says, “people
began to react against it in a way that I don’t
think they thought about very hard. I think
they just thought, Oh my god, the country
is falling apart, so let’s go to Montreal and
we’ll have a demonstration and say, ‘Please
