Tag: guitar

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MoSH Celebrates the Guitar

Explore the guitar. (Photo: Collins Dillard)

“Once the Europeans came to America in the late 1400s — Columbus, colonial invasion, all that stuff — they brought three things with them: guns, foreign influence, and guitars,” says Harvey Newquist, the founder of the National Guitar Museum. “Ever since then, the guitar has been a part of the American nation. … You can track American history through the way people have used guitars, not only for music but also as symbols of what they’re doing.”

Indeed, within the National Guitar Museum’s traveling exhibition “America at The Crossroads: The GUITAR and a Changing Nation” each of the 40 or so guitars represents a snapshot in U.S. history — “whether it’s an emblem or a symbol of the blues and emancipation of enslaved people going out and playing the blues circuit, onto country and Western music that became popular in the late 1800s, onto Hawaiian music which actually changed America in the early 1900s, on up into protest music and folk music,” Newquist says.

The exhibition, now on display at the Museum of Science & History, even has a bit of a Memphis touch, with one of B.B. King’s Lucilles and one of Elvis’ stage guitars on display. It also coincides with the museum’s “Grind City Picks: The Music That Made Memphis” exhibit, which centers around the guitar’s role in Memphis music history. “It’s a celebration of music and Memphis, but it’s not trying to be comprehensive,” says Raka Nandi, director of exhibits and collections. “We have 15 guitars and each one of them has an amazing story.”

From Albert King’s Flying V to The Bar-Kays’ James Alexander’s very first guitar to the guitars of Eric Gales and Sid Selvidge, the exhibit borrows guitars from “the people that you expect to hear about” and guitars from people who are newer to the scene like MonoNeon, Julien Baker, the Lipstick Stains, and Amy LaVere, who has lent her banjo. “These guitarists have really been at the forefront of the evolution of music in Memphis,” Nandi adds.

To accompany “Grind City Picks,” the museum also created a downloadable Spotify playlist for those who visit the exhibit. Additionally, MoSH will host “The Way They Play” every second Saturday of the month for the duration of the exhibit. The event will spotlight special guest musicians, who will demonstrate and talk about their quirks, techniques, and styles. “You’ll get an insider view on how an artist sort of thinks about that, and how they manipulate the instrument and how they’re creative with it,” says Nandi. The museum, she adds, will also host a monthly Laser Live, where Memphis musicians will perform live to a full laser light show in MoSH’s planetarium.

For more information on either exhibits and their programming, visit moshmemphis.com.

“America at the Crossroads: The Guitar and a Changing Nation” and “Grind City Picks: The MUsic That Made Memphis,” Museum of Science & History, on display through October 22.

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Fly Away

Ava Carrington and her dog, Mars (Photo: Michael Donahue)

Ava Carrington’s first musical instrument was a fence in her grandmother’s backyard.

“I’d get two sticks and I’d play on her old rusty metal fence,” she says. “I thought that sounded like I was making music, and I would sing along with it and make up little songs.”

Sixteen years later, Carrington, 18, is a recorded singer-songwriter. She played her version of “Canon in D (Pachelbel’s Canon)” by ear at the age of 4.

Carrington picked up the guitar at 7 and began writing songs the next year. “I’d never been in love. I’d never experienced that. But at age 8 I was only writing love songs. The lyrics are very funny.”

But, she says, “I had a pretty hard childhood. There was a lot of stuff going on. Fighting around me a lot of the time, which was stressful as a child. I took it upon myself to try to fix everything and be a people-pleaser. And I got lost in that. Because of that I missed out on a lot of my childhood and a lot of things I wish I would have experienced.”

Carrington began writing prolifically when she was in a treatment center for anxiety at 14. “Dragon Fly” was “about stuff I went through the year prior, which was one of the reasons I was sent there.”

She had gone to a Connecticut boarding school. “There was sexual assault,” she says. “And a lot of people didn’t believe me or do anything about it until it was happening to other girls at that school. I was barely 14 when I went there.”

“Dragon Fly” is about “going through it and processing it and wanting to get away or fly away from it.” Writing that song after “going through that shock at a young and impressionable age” gave her a lot of closure.

“That experience kind of made me lose myself a little bit. I didn’t feel I knew myself. And being able to have pieces of dialogue between myself and I helped me realize that sense of self — of who I am as a person.

“I do remember one line from it. It’s: ‘You sit and wonder why your head hurts when you cry/But, darling, that’s just life/You live until you die.’”

Treatment center residents sat outside her room and listened to her play guitar and sing. “The amount of people grew and grew and grew. I felt I was inspiring people, in a way. And I was able to connect with people in a creative and musical way.”

Carrington realized she wanted to “create music that people can relate to and experience life through.”

She then went to St. Mary’s School, a boarding school in Raleigh, North Carolina. “It was kind of a big breath of fresh air. Being somewhere where I had a sense of freedom.”

Carrington moved back to Memphis in 2021 and began recording with Elliott Ives and Scott Hardin at Young Avenue Sound.

The track “Messed Up Man” is based on experiences at that first boarding school, she says. “How the person that did that stuff to me and all the people screwing me over a little bit were supposedly mature people. But they really acted like children.”

Says Ives: “Ava is extremely talented at such a young age. She has a unique self-taught unorthodox guitar style that only she can execute. She’s not afraid to venture into different genres with her songwriting and production. Her voice is so pure and balanced. The mic loves her full range. She reminds me of a female Kurt Cobain, which I have not heard anyone of the like since Nirvana.

“All these elements combined with her real-life experienced subject matter set her apart as a songwriter and performer.”

Carrington, who is working with California producer Adam Castilla, says “loss of childhood” is a theme running through a lot of her new songs. “And wondering whether I’m grieving the passing of a simpler time or mourning the loss of something that was never given a chance to exist.”

To hear Carrington’s music, find her on Spotify.

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Shawn Lane: A Remembrance by Paul Taylor

This weekend marks the tenth anniversary of the passing of Shawn Lane. Lane was known the world over as a peerless guitarist. Newby’s is hosting a weekend-long festival of music to remember him. Below, his friend and student Paul Taylor remembers Lane as a mentor and considers Lane’s influence on his musical life.

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Shawn Lane was a preternaturally gifted guitarist, who by the age of 14 had mastered his own techniques and speed on the guitar that to this day remain nonreplicable. To this day, the current guitar wizards all genuflect and marvel at his unparalleled speed, melodicism, and compositional skills.

When I was a boy, my father would take me to see Shawn, and I really couldn’t — I still can’t — understand how anyone could play that fast. At first, I made the common mistake of writing it off as finger-wiggling with no depth. My brain couldn’t process it. Many guitarists view Shawn this way at first. Maybe It’s a mechanism of jealousy, or all of our ears are just entirely too slow!

My dad’s band was Shawn’s rhythm section, so I had access to bootleg tapes that would become his Warner Brother record Powers of Ten. I obsessively wore those tapes out. Slowly it began to sink in. This guy was playing very legitimate musical patterns at blinding Art-Tatum-does-triple-time speed. It was no B.S. And it was all on top of his beautiful compositions that had the rare ability to invoke deep feelings. That trait is so hard to come by in instrumental music. It was a rare gift.

Shawn did his best to teach others how to do what he did but always would say that his nervous system was just wired differently.

I had the good fortune of befriending Shawn and playing music with him in my late teens and early 20s. It was at this time that his true depth became clear to me. He was an avid reader, student of philosophy, science and culture; a film devotee; a lover of soundtrack music and classical music. He was a self-taught piano savant and a student of music from all over the world, especially qawwali (Sufi music of Southeast Asia) and Indian classical.

In the last 10 years of Shawn’s life he was able to tour the world in a trio with bassist Jonas Hellborg and master drummer Jeff Sipe. Shawn’s interest in Indian classical music was fulfilled as they toured India, and he made music and studied with many of his heroes. Shawn himself is still regarded as a hero all across Europe and the east.

Shawn languished in obscurity stateside and particularly in his hometown of Memphis. In a city that claims to be a music town, his is no new story: Original artist/innovator can’t buy a gig, while cover bands thrive on Beale and dance and garage bands fuel people’s weekends. Shawn led that double life many of us know well. His craft was recognized largely everywhere on earth except for this town.

After battling illness for most of his adult life and without health coverage, Shawn’s health took a drastic downward turn in 2003, and he died from a lung-related illness 10 years ago today.

Although his technical wizardry will always be that for which he is most known, Shawn’s legacy lies far more in his melodicism and his compositions than in his speed and literally unparalleled technical prowess on guitar (and piano). His soul shines through in his songs: in the singing bits of his guitar parts, the little inflections.

Still, for pure fire and an unworldly experience, watch footage of Shawn. It’s unholy. Actually, it’s totally holy!!

His friends and family sorely miss Shawn, but he isn’t going anywhere. He still sits atop the ever-clattering mountain of competing guitarists, laughing down at a rat race he never had to play a part in. He transcended. He transcends.

LONG LIVE SHAWN LANE!

— Paul Taylor