FEATURE
Taylor became consumed with the idea of
discovering or creating an object that would
speak for all Canadians, for the First Nations,
the French, the English and the immigrants;
something democratic that every single person could embrace as their own. His lifelong
love of music led him quickly to the guitar: “If
I ask you to put ten Canadians in your mind
who have helped define Canadian culture,
I’ll bet you half of them are holding guitars.
Besides which, everybody knows somebody
who plays the guitar. Everybody has held a
guitar. And if you don’t play it, your brother or
your sister or your cousin does. It’s portable,
it’s democratic, it’s relatively easy to play.”
Shortly after the Quebec referendum,
Taylor started having conversations about a
“national guitar” with George Rizsanyi, a proponent of building guitars from local materials instead of importing woods from half a
planet away. He had, in fact, built instruments
incorporating woods from his own Ontario
property. Taylor asked Rizsanyi if he thought
he could build a guitar using pieces of wood
from every province in Canada, and Rizsanyi
replied, “I’d love to try.” Taylor began to
reach out to communities across Canada to
ask what people thought would be appropriate material for such a project. The scope of
the project opened up dramatically when he
met Shingoose, a First Nations guitar player
from Manitoba. When asked what kind of
material the FN community in Manitoba
would wish to contribute, Shingoose told
Taylor that he should get a piece of a
Residential School.
Taylor explains, “Residential Schools were
run by churches, and many native children
were abused for decades in the schools.”
Shingoose felt that putting a piece of a
Residential School in this guitar would be a
healing gesture, and Taylor agreed.
Taylor asked Rizsanyi if he could use material
that had already been used for something
else, and Rizsanyi indicated that because
the wood would already be cured it might
actually speed up the process. At that point
Taylor’s focus became not simply gathering
representative materials, but actually gathering pieces that told stories of Canadian culture and history.
And so in this unprecedented guitar you
will find, among other things, pieces of
one of Pierre Trudeau’s canoe paddles, a
3.96-billion-year-old piece of stone (Acasta
gneiss), a piece of Wayne Gretzky’s hockey
stick, part of the handle of Joe Labobe’s
championship oyster-shucking knife, a piece
of gold from Rocket Richard’s Stanley Cup
Ring 1955–56, a section of the bar from the
restaurant on Prince Edward Island where
the song “Snowbird” was first performed by
songwriter Gene Maclellan, and a piece of
First Nation pipe stone.
Kevin Breit
Freshly cut from the Golden Spruce, the top awaits its
trip to Rizsanyi’s workshop.
