I wanted to make an instrumental artwork that had a simple wood tone finish about it in remembrance of a priest at our primary school in 1973 who had an early model electric guitar.
A priest with an electric guitar is not a very common site, especially in 1973 in New Zealand, and I wondered at the time about all the radical songs and sounds he would not be allowed to play on it.
I had a friend in Florida USA who had driven up to the home of the blues in Clarksdale Mississippi to pick up some wood recycled from the old Cotton Mill they had demolished on Hopsons Plantation. The Plantation has been a famous site in Southern USA for a long time and is steeped in the blues tradition.
Out of the recycled wood he was making a limited edition range of four string cigarbox guitar pickups and I thought they would fit perfectly into the ethos of this guitar. I hoped maybe trapped in the recycled wood were the sounds of the early blues players who played in and near the great mill.
I cut seven frets into the neck to match some old homemade guitars I had seen in pictures of old blues players guitars, and added the cross fret markers in honour of the blues and rock playing priest in my childhood who seemed to me to be ahead of the flock.
SCALE LENGTH:GIBSON 24 ¾” 629 mm ELECTRIC, RIGHT HANDED, SEVEN FRETTED, FOUR STRING CIGARBOX GUITAR.