This guitar is a collaboration with Tlingit artist Wayne Price. Years ago, I worked with Wayne on the Sealaska Heritage building in Juneau. I was sandblasting formline designs into glass, and he was texturing all the interior woodwork with a hand adze. Every day we would sit on his pile of cedar boards at lunch and talk about art and history while eating smoked salmon. Wayne noted that this was something Tlingit artists had probably been doing for millennia – eating smoked salmon while sitting on the cedar they were working on.
The place where I live, Haines, Alaska, is locally known as Deishu – the End of the Trail. I have always felt the presence of Tlingit culture and history here. I wanted to make a guitar to honor that. The top is red cedar, the same wood that is often carved into totem poles. The color scheme is red and black, which is also used in Tlingit art and regalia.
The back and sides are Indian rosewood. The binding is ebony, and the purfling is red veneer. Getting all the lines to match up at both ends of the guitar is fun and challenging.
I commissioned Wayne to draw out this design. Eagle is on the left, Raven on the right. These are the two moieties in Tlingit culture. I then cut the design out of mother of pearl and stained glass, and inlaid it into the fingerboard. Traditionally the primary formline is drawn in black, but in this case it had to be white mother of pearl to show up against the ebony. Red is the traditional color for the secondary forms, and blue-green is used for the tertiary forms.