For Canada day.. the Canadian Guitar.

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The Canadian Guitar.. Courtesy of CBC.com

A special guitar built from a patchwork of Canadian history, tells a unique story of Canada.

CBC radio host Jowi Taylor and master Luthier George Rizsanyi have realized a decade old dream to build a six string “nation†guitar out of bits and pieces from historic sites. They collected wood, bone and metal, from every corner of the country. The guitar will make it's debut in Canada Day Celebrations in Ottawa on July 1st.

“The Canadian Guitar†is a one hour documentary that follows the progress of the guitar and visits several of the sites that have contributed pieces to this patchwork history. Every piece tells it’s own story.

The wood forming the front of the guitar comes from the Golden Spruce of Haida Gwaii, the Queen Charlotte Islands. The tree was a 300 year old mutant evergreen with golden needles, but that wasn't all that made it special. According to Haida legend, the tree embodied the spirit of a little boy who became rooted on the spot after defying his grandfather.

The tree was famous and everyone wanted to protect it, however, in 1997, a vandal took a axe to it. It has been lying in forest, untouched, ever since because the Haida did not want to disturb the spirit. But when Jowi Taylor presented the idea of the guitar, the elders agreed to offer a piece of the tree so that the story of the Haida, and the importance of trees to Haida culture, could be told nationally.

From Newfoundland, there is a piece of wood from the Christmas Seal, a boat that functioned as a floating TB clinic to outport communites in the 1950s and 1960s. We learn about the famous Captain Peter Troake who managed to cajole worried villagers into coming aboard the boat for a check up and x-ray.

From Toronto, an old seat from Massey Hall has become part of the guitar. We tell the story of a grand old concert hall with fascinating architectural idiosyncracies.

Justin Trudeau tells us why he donated a canoe paddle that once belonged to his father, and in Montreal, we visit Canada's oldest bagel factory. The Fairmont Bakery donated a bagel paddle embedded with the lingering odor of sesame.

piece of the St. Boniface Museum recalls the early French Canadian settlers who centered their community around a convent that is now the oldest building in Winnipeg.

The guitar also reveals some untold black history in Quebec, as it takes us to the community of Saint Armand near the Vermont border, where it is believed there was once a black cemetery and slaves buried beneath a famous rock.

A piece from Halifax's Pier 21 has special significance for Luthier Rizsanyi. He came to Canada as a Hungarian refugee fifty years ago, and passed through Pier 21 when he arrived. Pier 21 was an immigration center for a million people who entered Canada via the port of Halifax.

More of the Same..

TORONTO (CP) - Jowi Taylor spent more than a decade assembling a collection of quintessentially Canadian artifacts that define us as a nation:

Pierre Trudeau's canoe paddle. The ship deck of the Bluenose II. Paul Henderson's hockey stick. The Golden Spruce.

And when he finally found them, Taylor had the treasured icons torn apart, chopped up and mashed together until they bore no resemblance to their original forms.

The result was the Six String Nation Guitar - a uniquely Canadian instrument made up of symbols and stories from sea to sea.

The honey-coloured acoustic with the stylized Maple Leaf makes its debut performance in Ottawa on Saturday in the hands of Ontario singer-songwriter Stephen Fearing.

Taylor, host of the CBC radio program Global Village, and luthier George Rizsanyi spent 11 years in their quest to secure materials and build the ultimate Canadian guitar.

"In Canada we tend to think that we only have room for a certain number of stories," says Taylor, who funded the project with his own bank account before finding private donors in March.

"There are a few that get told over and over and over again, in the same way that we tend to see the same Anne Murray specials over and over and over again.... I think Canada is so much richer than that, there are so many more stories, there are so many more communities. Each of them is part of the country, they're woven deeply into the fabric. Even if they are not big stories that doesn't mean that the rest of the country doesn't depend on those stories for their texture."

Rizsanyi built the guitar in his workshop near Pinehurst, N.S.

There's not one part of the instrument - inside or out - that doesn't reveal a piece of Canada's history.

Most of the front piece is cut from the Golden Spruce - a majestic 300-year-old tree revered by the Haida-Gwaii of British Columbia and cut down by a madman in 1997.

The guitar's neck is a laminate of several pieces including the Bluenose, a bagel shibba (used to move bagels in and out of brick ovens) from Montreal, and oak from the St. Boniface Museum in Manitoba, the building in which Louis Riel went to school.

The pick guard - a Maple Leaf in three parts - is stained with red ochre from Newfoundland and includes part of the homes of basketball inventor John Naismith and John Ware, a respected black cowboy who died just days after Alberta became a province of Canada in 1905.

The leaf stem is made up of one of Henderson's hockey sticks, a Wayne Gretzky hockey stick and a seat from the Montreal Forum.

Unseen inside is a piece of wood from Fan Tan Alley, Canada's first Chinatown in Victoria; Nancy Greene's childhood skis, and one of Trudeau's canoe paddles.

"The actual physical guitar is maybe even less important than what it's made of and what it represents," says Fearing, who will play his song The Longest Road before passing the guitar to Colin Linden, Tom Wilson and other musicians during the Canada Day performance.

"It's quite mystical stuff, the fact that you can make an instrument that makes music from bits and things I find very exciting. All the things that have gone into this guitar I think will definitely resonate in it."

The guitar is booked on a tour of summer folk festivals and will eventually find its way back to all the communities from which it came, says Taylor.

Beyond that, Taylor has even grander plans.

"I'd love to see it launch the Olympics, I'd love to see it half-time at the Grey Cup, I'd love to see it open the Arctic Winter Games," says Taylor, who is also making a movie about the construction and journey home.

"I would really like it to become a bit of a touchstone for Canadian identity and Canadian events."

Taylor also hopes to soon have an official name for the Canadiana guitar - Six String Nation Guitar is a working title. The instrument was only completed about two weeks ago, he says.

The guitar is featured in a CBC Newsworld documentary called Sea to Sea, airing Friday at 10 p.m. ET and Saturday at 7 p.m. ET.

Taylor said he has commissioned a sister guitar called Echo that will be outfitted with 14 sensors to track pressure, motion, heat and light. It will include a camera and GPS unit to track its every move.

The plan is to give it to someone to play for a few days and then pass on to another Canadian musician.

"This guitar will keep a kind of record of its own journey that it will share on the web and people will be able to track it and see what kind of experience it's having," says Taylor, who hopes to have it completed by the end of the year.

"It'll open - another window on the relationship between musicians and their instruments."

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(CP) - A remarkable acoustic guitar made up of bits and pieces of Canadian history makes its debut Saturday at a Canada Day performance on Parliament Hill. A look at its parts:

The neck: decking from the Bluenose II; the Papineau Manor (built by Louis-Joseph Papineau who led the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837-38); a bagel shibba from Montreal; oak from the St. Boniface Museum (the oldest building in Winnipeg, where Louis Riel went to school)

Inside: a piece from Fan Tan Alley (Canada's first Chinatown in Victoria); champion skier Nancy Greene's childhood skis; former prime minister Pierre Trudeau's canoe paddle

Maple Leaf pick guard: part of cowboy John Ware's cabin; part of basketball inventor John Naismith's house; an inset of a wooden nickel made out of the third Maid of the Mist built in 1885; red ochre stain from Newfoundland; Paul Henderson's hockey stick; Wayne Gretzky's hockey stick; a seat from the Montreal Forum

The bridgepins: Henderson and Gretzky's sticks; slate from a slave chapel in St. Armand, Que., dating back to just after the American Revolution

The head: decorated with a diamond-shaped inset made of green jade from northwest British Columbia.

The 1st fret: stone from the monument to Shu-kwe-wee-tam/Almightyvoice (an aboriginal hero in Saskatchewan born in 1875); raw silver from the Beaver mine in Cobalt, Ont.; a piece of the oldest rock in the world (Acasta gneiss, found at Great Bear Lake, believed to be nearly 4 billion years old).

The 3rd fret: decorated with labradorite, the official mineral of Newfoundland and Labrador; moose shin; copper from the roof of the library of Parliament

The 9th Fret: decorated with moose antler from Pick River First Nation on Lake Superior; blue Labradorite from Nain, N.L.; a gold dot from Maurice (Rocket) Richard's Stanley Cup ring of 1955-56.