If you could tell America's story using just one object, what would you choose?

Consider the guitar.

A touring exhibition from the National Guitar Museum in New York City celebrates the evolution and cultural impact of the instrument.

It was recently on display at the Bishop Museum of Science and Nature in Bradenton.

It's titled, "America at the Crossroads, The Guitar and a Changing Nation."

Exhibition is called, "America at the Crossroads," and it's about guitars.

[guitar music] This is one of the coolest exhibitions I've seen in the 42 years I've been coming here as a musician to see all these different guitars and all these state of the art guitars, all these historic guitars, really one of the coolest things I've seen here.

So I've been playing guitar almost 40 years, and that's one of the reasons I really wanted to bring this exhibit here, because I wanted to be able to share with people my passion for guitars.

This is from the National Guitar Museum in New York City, and they travel guitar exhibits around the world.

And this is one of three they have currently traveling around, but this one we thought that people at Bradenton would really enjoy.

So this looks at how guitars came to be in the United States of America, how they really evolved, changed, and then in the 20th century, how guitars became a symbol of American social movement.

Well, the origins of the guitar really came from the Middle East.

And maybe 2000 years ago.

They have ouds and they have lutes.

Lots of early stringed instruments where basically they realize that plucking a string under tension over some object would make a musical sound.

By the time we get to the 1500s, you start to see what look like guitars today.

Just a lot smaller and a slightly different shape, but they're very, very similar.

And that's when the settlers came over, brought them over from Europe, and that's when we start to see them arrive in the Americas.

[light guitar music] So it starts with the first guitars that came to America that actually were first found in St. Augustine, with the Spanish settlers who came over there.

It then looked at over the next couple of hundred years, how acoustic guitars and Spanish classical guitars Evolved, became something a little bit louder.

Got picked up.

But then it gets really exciting when we get into the Jazz Age, into the country Bluegrass Age, and then when electric guitars start happening.

A very American story and how electric guitars really took over and became something that American social history evolved around the same time as.

[music] Where you get the Martin Company up in Pennsylvania, they develop a way to make guitars stronger, which makes them bigger and makes them louder, but still have a great tone.

But it's really in the 20th century.

Everything really changes when they start to learn how to electrify guitars, put electric pickups on them, plug them into what were converted radiograms, and now the guitars finally get loud enough to compete with a jazz band or a big band, and all of a sudden the guitar isn't a rhythm instrument anymore.

It becomes a lead instrument and you start to get people like Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian start playing lead jazz guitar.

That changes everything.

So what happened after World War II is American society really started to evolve and people had a lot more leisure time.

People started to have money again, and Americans wanted to go out and dance and hear live music.

So the auditoriums the bands would be playing got larger.

That meant the guitars had to get louder.

I definitely think it's an absolute collaboration because it's the needs of the guitar players versus what the manufacturers are putting together.

So the Telecaster and the Stratocaster made by Fender is a perfect example.

There are only a few years apart in their production, but Fender took the advice from the musicians and put all that advice and work into the Fender Stratocaster.

And now that's the most popular electric guitar to this day.

Every type of movement needs a new guitar, and that's one of the things we look at here in the exhibit is you have the guitars that made rock and roll, you have the guitars that made jazz, you have the guitars that made country, western and bluegrass.

But then later on in the exhibit, you get into things like Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstrat guitar that became a symbol of heavy metal.

Particularly, one of the most interesting objects we have is a guitar designed by Annie Clark of St. Vincent, and that was by the Ernie Ball Music Man Company, the first time a female artist actually designed a guitar from the ground up.

Before then, women had played the same guitars as men, but quite often had problems with the scale lengths being big, the bodies being big, and this was the first time a female artist actually designed a guitar to be based around a woman's body.

[music] So as guitars got louder and you could start focusing on the lead guitarist, they started presenting a story to America.

So through the civil rights movement, through women's rights movements, through just whatever's going on, we tell other people our story and try to fix and solve problems and make change by just playing that song.

How emotional do you get when you hear that favorite song of yours, and it makes you want to act on something?

I think guitars are always going to be there, and I think there's something about getting up on stage, playing through an amplifier, playing through a big open G chord and feeling that air moving behind you and the sense of the vibration through your body.

The first time any young player does that and makes a chord that sounds good, there's just no feeling like it.

I love electronic music too, but when you actually get a guitar strapped on when you play it, there's just something visceral about it and physical about it that you can't replicate.

And there'll always be a place for people playing those big, loud chords through big amplifiers and getting that feeling and what that invokes in an audience.

It's the loudest, all the other instruments, they can only go so far, but with amplification, the electric guitar can outplay anything.

And that's why it takes the spotlight when you're going to concerts.

It's bold, but it's very expressive.

You can be quiet with it.

You can be soft with it.

You can be dramatic with it.

You can be mad with it.

You can be angry.

You can be happy, you can be cheerful, but you're going to be loud or soft.

[music] I think there's lots to take away from this exhibit.

I think if you like music, you get a chance to see the guitars up close that your favorite musicians have played.

If you play guitar, you get to see some guitars here that maybe you've never seen before, which is my experience with this exhibit.

But what I would love people to take away is understand what a really amazing American story the electric guitar was particularly, and I would love it if people went away and thought, you know what?

I'm going to give that a go.

I think there's something special here.

There's a lot of variety, and I would love people to actually go buy their first starter guitar.

It's never been a better time because starter guitars now are better quality than they've ever been.

I would love some people in 3 or 4 years time to come back to the museum and say, I came to your exhibit.

I started playing guitar and I'm still playing today.

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