Ohio State Marching Band Plays Tribute to Rush: “2112,” “YYZ,” “Tom Sawyer” & “Limelight”

It all took place at this week­end’s Ohio State-Mary­land game. Enjoy.…

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Relat­ed Con­tent

The Anti-Con­formist, Lib­er­tar­i­an Phi­los­o­phy That Shaped Rush’s Clas­sic Albums

Wit­ness Rush Drum­mer Neil Peart’s (RIP) Finest Moments On Stage and Screen

Notre Dame March­ing Band Per­forms “This Too Shall Pass”

Watch “The Impossible Map,” a Short Animated Film That Uses a Grapefruit to Show Why Maps of the Earth Are Misleading (1947)

There are any num­ber of ways one might try to turn a globe into a two-dimen­sion­al sur­face. You could start by cut­ting it down the mid­dle, as in this Vox video on world maps. You could choose vol­un­teers and have them come up to the head of the class and peel oranges in one piece, flat­ten­ing out the strips onto an over­head pro­jec­tor, as in this Nation­al Geo­graph­ic les­son on world maps. Or, you might attack an already halved grape­fruit peel with a rolling pin, as in the Nation­al Film Board of Canada’s ani­mat­ed short, “The Impos­si­ble Map,” above.

Each method (except, maybe, the rolling pin) has its mer­its, but none of them will make a 2‑dimensional sur­face with­out warp­ing, stretch­ing, and dis­tort­ing. That’s the point, in all these exer­cis­es, a point that has been made over and over through­out the years as car­tog­ra­phers search for bet­ter, more accu­rate ways to turn the Earth’s sphere (or oblate spher­oid) into a rep­re­sen­ta­tive rec­tan­gle that rough­ly pre­serves the scale of the con­ti­nents. As the hands-on demon­stra­tions show, you don’t need to remem­ber your geom­e­try to see that it’s impos­si­ble to do so with much pre­ci­sion.

A car­tog­ra­ph­er must choose a focal point, as Ger­ar­dus Mer­ca­tor did in the 16th cen­tu­ry in his famous cylin­dri­cal pro­jec­tion. Since the map was designed by a Euro­pean for use by Euro­pean nav­i­ga­tors, it nat­u­ral­ly puts Europe in the cen­ter, result­ing in extreme dis­tor­tions of the land mass­es around it. These have been reme­died by alter­nate pro­jec­tions like the Moll­wei­de, Goode Homolo­sine (the “orange-peel map”), and the 1963 Robin­son pro­jec­tion, which was “adopt­ed for Nation­al Geographic’s world maps in 1988,” The Guardian notes, and “appears in [a] grow­ing num­ber of oth­er pub­li­ca­tions, [and] may replace Mer­ca­tor in many class­rooms.”

Pio­neer­ing Cana­di­an ani­ma­tor Eve­lyn Lam­bart made “The Impos­si­ble Map” in 1947, sev­er­al years before pro­fes­sor Arthur Robin­son cre­at­ed his “Pseudo­cylin­dri­cal Pro­jec­tion with Pole Line” — for which he used “a huge num­ber of tri­al-and-error com­put­er sim­u­la­tions,” as the Arthur H. Robin­son Map Library writes. “To this day, no oth­er pro­jec­tion uses this approach to build a map,” not even most GPS map­ping soft­ware, which still, in many cas­es, uses a “Web Mer­ca­tor” pro­jec­tion to rep­re­sent the whole Earth. But while Lam­bart’s film may not be tech­no­log­i­cal­ly up-to-date, it is visu­al­ly and ped­a­gog­i­cal­ly bril­liant, explain­ing, with some basic nar­ra­tion and sliced pro­duce, why globes still beat flat maps of the Earth every time.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

Why Mak­ing Accu­rate World Maps Is Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Impos­si­ble

Why Every World Map Is Wrong

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Quentin Tarantino Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becoming a Filmmaker

When Quentin Taran­ti­no hit it big in the 1990s with Reser­voir Dogs, and then much big­ger with Pulp Fic­tion, he became known as the auteur who’d received his film edu­ca­tion by work­ing as a video-store clerk. But like much Hol­ly­wood hype, that sto­ry was­n’t quite true. “No, I was already a movie expert,” says the man him­self in a clip from the 1994 BBC doc­u­men­tary Quentin Taran­ti­no: Hol­ly­wood’s Boy Won­der. “That’s how I got hired at Video Archives.” Locat­ed in the South Bay — a com­par­a­tive­ly lit­tle-seen region of Los Ange­les Coun­ty lat­er paid lov­ing trib­ute with Jack­ie Brown — the store was, in the words of one of its own­ers, “one of the few places that Quentin could come as a reg­u­lar guy and get a job and become like a star.”

“Me and the oth­er guys would walk into the local movie the­ater and we’d be head­ing toward our seats and we’d hear, ‘There go the guys from Video Archives,’ ” says Taran­ti­no in Tom Ros­ton’s I Lost It at the Video Store. On one lev­el, the expe­ri­ence con­sti­tut­ed “a primer to what it would be like to be famous.” Hav­ing begun as a Video Archives cus­tomer, Taran­ti­no wound up work­ing there for five years, offer­ing volu­mi­nous and force­ful rec­om­men­da­tions by day and, after clos­ing, putting on staff-only film fes­ti­vals by night. “That time is cap­tured per­fect­ly in True Romance,” which Tony Scott direct­ed but Taran­ti­no wrote, and one of those co-work­ers, Roger Avary, would col­lab­o­rate with him on the screen­play for Pulp Fic­tion.

Video Archives was a bea­con to all the South Bay’s “film geeks.” Then as now, most such peo­ple “devote a lot of mon­ey and they devote a lot of their life to the fol­low­ing of film, but they don’t real­ly have that much to show for all this devo­tion,” oth­er than their strong­ly held cin­e­mat­ic opin­ions. “What you find out fair­ly quick­ly in Hol­ly­wood is, this is a com­mu­ni­ty where hard­ly any­body trusts their own opin­ion. Peo­ple want peo­ple to tell them what is good, what to like, what not to like.” Hence the abil­i­ty of the young Taran­ti­no,  brim­ming with opin­ions and unafraid to state them and pos­sessed of an unwa­ver­ing resolve to make movies of his own, to go from video-store clerk­ing prac­ti­cal­ly straight to the top of the indus­try. Though he did­n’t need film school — nor col­lege, or indeed high school — he could hard­ly have found a more suit­able alma mater.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Last Video Store: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on How the World’s Old­est Video Store Still Sur­vives Today

Quentin Taran­ti­no Picks the 12 Best Films of All Time; Watch Two of His Favorites Free Online

Quentin Tarantino’s Hand­writ­ten List of the 11 “Great­est Movies”

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

Quentin Taran­ti­no Reviews Movies: From Dunkirk and King of New York, to Soul Broth­ers of Kung Fu & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A Walking Tour Around the Pyramids of Giza: 2 Hours in Hi Def

One of the first things tourists learn about the great Pyra­mids of Giza is how they are not far away in some remote loca­tion. Turns out they’re just pho­tographed that way with the West­ern Desert as back­drop. Turn around and you’ll see not just the bustling city of Cairo, but a freakin’ golf course. The next thing tourists learn is that there’s a lot of walk­ing if you want to take in both pyra­mids and the Sphinx. Hope you packed some good shoes!

Or you could sit back and watch this one-hour-and-50-minute walk­ing tour, shot in 4K, on a chilly Jan­u­ary morn­ing in 2019. There’s not many tourists around for most of it, bet­ter to instill a sense of won­der and oth­er­ness as you encounter these 4,500 year old struc­tures.

With its relax­ing bob­bing-head cam­era and its immer­sive field record­ing soundtrack—headphones are recommended—the video tours the entire ancient area, start­ing with the Mor­tu­ary Tem­ple of Khafre, then mov­ing to the two main pyra­mids, the ceme­tery, the small­er pyra­mid of Menkau­re, and end­ing on the Sphinx. There’s even room for a horse ride, although as it’s sped up, it turns out to be rather com­i­cal. It’s also a delight to hear the occa­sion­al camel make them­selves known.

Open Cul­ture has writ­ten about the Pyra­mids of Giza sev­er­al times. We’ve linked to the mas­sive Dig­i­tal Giza Project; shown a 3‑D recon­struc­tion of what the pyra­mids looked like when they were orig­i­nal­ly built (they were gleam­ing white, for one thing); fol­lowed a 3‑D tour *inside* the pyra­mid that is quite spine-tin­gling; and high­light­ed an intro­duc­to­ry course of Giza and Egyp­tol­ogy. The only remain­ing of the Sev­en Won­ders of the Ancient World con­tin­ues to inspire a new gen­er­a­tion of archae­ol­o­gists, and this walk­ing tour is as close as your brows­er can get to being there. ProWalk Tours’ YouTube site also offers many oth­er pleas­ant walks, from the ancient to the mod­ern. They’re worth check­ing out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 4,000-Year-Old Stu­dent ‘Writ­ing Board’ from Ancient Egypt (with Teacher’s Cor­rec­tions in Red)

Won­ders of Ancient Egypt: A Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Orig­i­nal Col­ors Still In It

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

An Animated History of the Ottoman Empire (1299 — 1922)

His­to­ry is selec­tive. Or, rather, it’s select­ed by those in pow­er for their own uses. Nowhere do we see this more than in nation­al­ist re-imag­in­ings of an impe­r­i­al past, whether it be British, Roman, or, in the case of mod­ern Turkey, Ottoman. “Much has been writ­ten,” notes Time magazine’s Alan Mikhail, “about [Turk­ish pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s attempts to ‘res­ur­rect’ the Ottoman Empire or to style him­self a sul­tan.” Erdogan’s turn to hard­line Islam has been inspired by one par­tic­u­lar sul­tan, Selim I, under whose rule, “the Ottoman Empire grew from a strong region­al pow­er to a gar­gan­tu­an glob­al empire.” Mikhail com­pares Selim to anoth­er his­tor­i­cal fig­ure famed for sin­gle-mind­ed intol­er­ance: Andrew Jack­son, a hero of the for­mer Unit­ed States pres­i­dent.

Erdogan’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the Ottoman Empire some­times seems to have more in com­mon with ear­ly Euro­pean ideas about the empire than its ideas about itself. Euro­pean writ­ers in the 16th and 17th cen­tu­ry linked the Ottomans with Islamist repres­sion, an Ori­en­tal­ist take on Turk­ish pow­er as a dan­ger­ous yet seduc­tive new ene­my. “The glo­ri­ous Empire of the Turkes, the present ter­rour of the world,” wrote Richard Knolles in his 1603 Gen­er­all His­to­rie of the Turkes, “hath amongst oth­er things noth­ing in it more won­der­ful or strange, than the poore begin­ning of itselfe….” These same sen­ti­ments were echoed in 1631 by Eng­lish writer John Speed, who described the “sud­den advance­ment” of the Empire as “a ter­rour to the whole world.” Like­wise, Andrew Moore in 1659 wrote of “this bar­barous Nation, the worlds present ter­rour,” a nation with a “small & obscure begin­ning.”

All empires have small begin­nings. In the case of the Ottomans, the sto­ry begins with Osman I, a trib­al leader of obscure ori­gins who found­ed the Empire in Ana­to­lia some 300 years before the authors above put pen to paper. (The word “Ottoman” derives from his name.) A series of con­quests fol­lowed, the most dra­mat­ic occur­ring in 1453 when Mehmed the Con­quer­er entered Con­stan­tino­ple, effec­tive­ly end­ing the Byzan­tine Empire, an event you can see high­light­ed in the video above, an “entire his­to­ry of the Ottoman Empire” — all 600 years of it — from 1299 to 1922. Such an extend­ed peri­od of con­quest and influ­ence led, of course, to a vari­ety of views about the nature of the Ottomans, not least among the Ottomans them­selves, who saw them­selves not as Mus­lim invaders of Europe but as the right­ful heirs of Rome. Indeed, edu­cat­ed Ottomans referred to them­selves not as “Turks,” a word for the peas­antry, but as Rūmī, “Roman.”

In many ways, the Ottomans — bloody con­quests, slav­ery, geno­cides and all — took after the Romans. “Obvi­ous­ly they saw val­ue in spread­ing reli­gion,” says David Lesch, pro­fes­sor of Mid­dle East his­to­ry at Trin­i­ty Uni­ver­si­ty in San Anto­nio. But they did not share the nar­ra­tive of a “clash of civ­i­liza­tions” favored by Euro­pean writ­ers of the time, and cer­tain revi­sion­ists today. “The Ottoman Empire saw itself as very much, even more so a Euro­pean empire than a Mid­dle East­ern empire. And they took a very tol­er­ant view toward non-Mus­lims since for most of the Ottoman Empire — espe­cial­ly when it was at its largest — most of its pop­u­la­tion was non-Mus­lim. It was in fact Chris­t­ian.” The obser­va­tion brings to mind the cen­tral claim of Turk­ish schol­ar Namık Kemal’s influ­en­tial essay “Europe Knows Noth­ing about the Ori­ent,” in which he writes that Euro­pean schol­ars have failed to under­stand the “true char­ac­ter such as ours, which is so close to them that … it might as well be touch­ing their eye­lash­es.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Down­load Thou­sands of Ottoman-Era Pho­tographs That Have Been Dig­i­tized and Put Online

The Rise and Fall of West­ern Empires Visu­al­ized Through the Art­ful Metaphor of Cell Divi­sion

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Ani­mat­ed Time-Lapse Map ( 519 A.D. to 2014 A.D.)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

A Brilliant Demonstration of Magnets & the Promise of Levitating Trains (1975)

For a brief time in the 1980s, it seemed like trains pow­ered by maglev — mag­net­ic lev­i­ta­tion — might just solve trans­porta­tion prob­lems every­where, maybe even replac­ing air trav­el, there­by elim­i­nat­ing one of the most vex­ing sources of car­bon emis­sions. Maglev trains don’t use fuel; they don’t require very much pow­er by com­par­i­son with oth­er sources of high speed trav­el; they don’t pro­duce emis­sions; they’re qui­et, require less main­te­nance than oth­er trains, and can trav­el at speeds of 300 mph and more. In fact, the fastest maglev train to date, unveiled this past sum­mer in Qing­dao, Chi­na, can reach speeds of up to 373 miles per hour (600 kph).

So, why isn’t the plan­et criss-crossed by maglev trains? asks Dave Hall at The Guardian, cit­ing the fact that the first maglev train was launched in the UK in 1984, after which Ger­many, Japan, and Chi­na fol­lowed suit. It seems to come down, as such things do, to “polit­i­cal will.” With­out sig­nif­i­cant com­mit­ment from gov­ern­ments to reshape the trans­porta­tion infra­struc­ture of their coun­tries, maglev trains remain a dream, the mono­rails of the future that nev­er mate­ri­al­ize. Even in Chi­na, where gov­ern­ment man­date can insti­tute mass changes at will, the devel­op­ment of maglev trains has not meant their deploy­ment. The new train could, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly, fer­ry trav­el­ers between Shang­hai to Bei­jing in 2.5 hours… if it had the track.

Per­haps some­day the world will catch up with maglev trains, an idea over a cen­tu­ry old. (The first patents for maglev tech­nol­o­gy were filed by a French-born Amer­i­can engi­neer named Emile Bachelet in the 1910s.) Until then, the rest of us can edu­cate our­selves on the tech­nol­o­gy of trains that use mag­net­ic lev­i­ta­tion with the 1975 video les­son above from British engi­neer and pro­fes­sor Eric Laith­waite (Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don), who “decon­structs the fas­ci­nat­ing physics at work behind his plans for a maglev trains, which he first mod­elled in the 1940s and per­fect­ed in the 1970s,” notes Aeon. “Well-regard­ed in his time as both a lec­tur­er and an engi­neer, Laith­waite presents a series of demon­stra­tions that build, step by step, until he final­ly unveils a small maglev train mod­el.”

Laithwaite’s small-scale demon­stra­tion would even­tu­al­ly cul­mi­nate in the first com­mer­cial maglev train almost a decade lat­er at Birm­ing­ham Air­port. Here, he begins where sci­ence begins, with an admis­sion of igno­rance. “Per­ma­nent mag­nets are dif­fi­cult things to under­stand,” he says. “In fact, if we’re absolute­ly hon­est with our­selves, we don’t under­stand them.” The good pro­fes­sor then briskly moves on to demon­strate what he does know — enough to build a lev­i­tat­ing train. Learn much more about the his­to­ry and tech­nol­o­gy of maglev trains at How Stuff Works, and keep your eyes on the North­east Maglev project, a devel­op­ing Super­con­duct­ing Maglev train that promis­es trav­el between New York and Wash­ing­ton, DC in one hour flat.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Fly­ing Train: A 1902 Film Cap­tures a Futur­is­tic Ride on a Sus­pend­ed Rail­way in Ger­many

In 1900, a Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Had to Cre­ate an Enor­mous 1,400-Pound Cam­era to Take a Pic­ture of an Entire Train

Free Online Physics Cours­es 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

How to Make Comics: A Four-Part Series from the Museum of Modern Art


A paint­ing? “Mov­ing. Spir­i­tu­al­ly enrich­ing. Sub­lime. ‘High’ art.” The com­ic strip? “Vapid. Juve­nile. Com­mer­cial hack work. ‘Low’ art.” A paint­ing of a com­ic strip pan­el? “Sophis­ti­cat­ed irony. Philo­soph­i­cal­ly chal­leng­ing. ‘High’ art.” So says Calvin of Bill Wat­ter­son­’s Calvin and Hobbes, whose ten-year run con­sti­tutes one of the great­est artis­tic achieve­ments in the his­to­ry of the news­pa­per com­ic strip. The larg­er medi­um of comics goes well beyond the fun­ny pages, as any num­ber of trend pieces have told us, but as an art form it remains less than per­fect­ly under­stood.  Per­haps, as else­where, one must learn by doing: hence “How to Make Comics,” a “four-part jour­ney through the art of comics” from the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art.

Cre­at­ed by comics schol­ar and writer Chris Gavaler, this edu­ca­tion­al series begins with the broad­est pos­si­ble ques­tion: “What Are Comics?” That sec­tion offers two answers, the first being that comics are “car­toons in the fun­nies sec­tions of news­pa­pers and the pages of com­ic books” telling sto­ries “about super­heroes or talk­ing ani­mals” — or they’re longer-for­mat “graph­ic nov­els,” which “can be more seri­ous and include per­son­al mem­oirs.”

The sec­ond, broad­er answer con­ceives of comics as noth­ing more spe­cif­ic than “jux­ta­posed images. Any work of art that divides into two or more side-by-side parts is for­mal­ly a com­ic. So if an artist cre­ates two images and places them next to each oth­er, they’re work­ing in the comics form.”

That sec­ond def­i­n­i­tion of comics includes, say, Andy Warhol’s Jacque­line Kennedy III — a work of art that con­ve­nient­ly hap­pens to be owned by MoMA. The muse­um’s visu­al resources fig­ure heav­i­ly into the whole “How to Make Comics,” in which Gavaler explains not just the process of cre­at­ing comics but the rela­tion­ship between comics and oth­er (often longer insti­tu­tion­al­ly approved) forms of art. And to what­ev­er degree they jux­ta­pose images, the works of art in MoMA’s online col­lec­tion — rich as so many of them are with action, char­ac­ter, nar­ra­tive, humor, and even words — offer inspi­ra­tion to com­ic artists bud­ding and expe­ri­enced alike. The bet­ter part of two cen­turies into its devel­op­ment, this thor­ough­ly mod­ern medi­um has the pow­er to incor­po­rate ideas from any oth­er art form; the high-and-low dis­tinc­tions can take care of them­selves. Enter “How to Make Comicshere.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Free Online Course on Mak­ing Com­ic Books, Com­pli­ments of the Cal­i­for­nia Col­lege of the Arts

Fol­low Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Barry’s 2017 “Mak­ing Comics” Class Online, Pre­sent­ed at UW-Wis­con­sin

Watch Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Barry’s Two-Hour Draw­ing Work­shop

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

MoMA’s Online Cours­es Let You Study Mod­ern & Con­tem­po­rary Art and Earn a Cer­tifi­cate

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A Guitarist Rocks Out on Guitars Made from Shovels, Cigar Boxes, Oil Cans & Whisky Barrels

When Kei­th Richards felt he’d gone as far as he could go with the six-string gui­tar, he took one string off and played five, a trick he learned from Ry Cood­er. These days, the trend is to go in the oppo­site direc­tion, up to sev­en or eight strings for high­ly tech­ni­cal pro­gres­sive met­al com­po­si­tions and down­tuned “djent.” Tra­di­tion­al­ists may balk at this. A five-string, after all, is a mod­i­fi­ca­tion eas­i­ly accom­plished with a pair of wire-cut­ters. But odd­ly shaped eight-string gui­tars seem like weird­ly roco­co extrav­a­gances next to your aver­age Stra­to­cast­er, Tele, or Les Paul.

Ideas we have about what a gui­tar should be, how­ev­er, come most­ly from the mar­ket­ing and pub­lic rela­tions machin­ery around big brand gui­tars and big name gui­tarists. The truth is, there is no Pla­ton­ic ide­al of the gui­tar, since no one is quite sure where the gui­tar came from.

It’s most eas­i­ly rec­og­nized ances­tors are the oud and the lute, which them­selves have ancient her­itages that stretch into pre­his­to­ry. The six-string arrived rather late on the scene. In the renais­sance, gui­tars had eight strings, tuned in four “cours­es,” or pairs, like the mod­ern 12-string, and baroque gui­tars had 10 strings in five cours­es.

Clos­er in time to us, “the jazz gui­tarist George Van Eps had a sev­en-string gui­tar built for him by Epi­phone Gui­tars in the late 1930s,” notes one brief his­to­ry, “and a sig­na­ture Gretsch sev­en-string in the late 60s and ear­ly 70s…. Sev­er­al oth­ers began using sev­en-string gui­tars after Van Eps.” Russ­ian folk gui­tars had sev­en strings before the arrival of six-string Span­ish clas­si­cal instru­ments (two hun­dred years before the arrival of Korn).

Mean­while, in the hills, hol­lars, and deltas of the U.S. south, folk and blues musi­cians built gui­tars out of what­ev­er was at hand, and fit as many, or as few, strings as need­ed. From these instru­ments came the pow­er­ful­ly sim­ple, time­less licks Keef spent his career emu­lat­ing. Gui­tarist Justin John­son has cul­ti­vat­ed an online pres­ence not only with his slick elec­tric slide play­ing, but also with his trib­utes to odd, old-time, home­made gui­tars. At the top, he plays a three-string shov­el gui­tar, doing Kei­th two bet­ter.

Fur­ther up, some “Porch Swing Slidin’” with a six-string cig­ar box-style gui­tar engraved with a por­trait of Robert John­son. Above, hear a stir­ring ren­di­tion of George Harrison’s “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” on an oil can and a slide solo on a whiskey bar­rel gui­tar. Final­ly, John­son rocks out Ray Charles on a three string cig­ar box gui­tar, made most­ly out of ordi­nary items you might find around the shed.

You might not be able to pluck out Renais­sance airs or com­pli­cat­ed, sweep-picked arpeg­gios on some of these instru­ments, but where would even the most com­plex pro­gres­sive rock and met­al be with­out the raw pow­er of the blues dri­ving the evo­lu­tion of the gui­tar? Final­ly, below, see John­son play a hand­made one-string Did­dley Bow (and see the mak­ing of the instru­ment as well). Orig­i­nal­ly a West African instru­ment, it may have been the very first gui­tar.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Kei­th Richards Demon­strates His Famous 5‑String Tech­nique (Used on Clas­sic Stones Songs Like “Start Me Up,” “Honky Tonk Women” & More)

Meet Brushy One String, the One String Gui­tar Play­er Who Will Blow Your Mind

The His­to­ry of the Gui­tar: See the Evo­lu­tion of the Gui­tar in 7 Instru­ments

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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