APPLETON - From Africa, the Middle East and Europe to the sticky stages of College Avenue bars, guitars have been used to entertain, move and provoke us for centuries.

They've been strummed, smashed, swung, burned, humped, thrown and windmilled. Some kill fascists, some gently weep, some are picked up at a five and dime.

Now, at the History Museum at the Castle, they're mostly just on display.

Designed to showcase the history, science and cultural impact of the world's most popular instrument, the exhibit "Guitar: The Instrument That Rocked the World" opened this week at the downtown Appleton museum. It's on display through the end of the year.

Dustin Mack, chief curator at the museum, said the opportunity to present something like "Guitar" as a follow-up to the Pro Football Hall of Fame exhibit that just finished its run was too good to pass up.

"After 'Gridiron Glory,' the question was what's next," Mack said. "We had to come up with something big — and the beauty of 'Gridiron Glory' was it tied in with local history, tied in with the Packers. The Fox Valley has such a vibrant music scene, with Mile of Music and the live performances going on year round, that we felt this not only touched on the national scope of the guitar but showed how that history connects to the local and what we have going on here, and that we're a part of something larger than just the music scene here in the Fox Valley."

The exhibit comes courtesy of the New York-based National Guitar Museum and includes more than 80 instruments, nearly 20 interactive elements and covers about 5,500 square feet on two floors of the History Museum.

The collection includes recreations of instruments dating back to 3,000 B.C. As far as originals go, the oldest guitar in the collection dates back to the early 1800s. There's also what's said to be the world's largest playable guitar, a flat-laying Flying V that's more than 40 feet long and weighs more than 2,000 pounds.

"You can walk all the way down it," Mack explained, "and you smack those cords. It doesn't sound good, but it makes noise, so it's playable."

So while there's a lot to look at, there's also a lot to play with. The family-friendly exhibit features STEM activities, taking it several steps beyond just a collection of cool-looking axes.

The touring exhibit launched in 2011 and Appleton is stop No. 24. This is its first visit to Wisconsin and the closest it's come is Cincinnati and Kalamazoo, Michigan. Mack said the hope is to draw visitors from around the state (and possibly beyond) throughout the summer.

There'll also be programming tied to Mile of Music in August, Mack said. The upstairs exhibition space has a stage where visitors will be able to jump on a drum kit or play guitars. During the Aug. 1-4 festival, professional musicians will perform on that same stage. 

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H.P. Newquist, executive director of the National Guitar Museum, started the endeavor about a decade ago. And while the National Guitar Museum has an office in New York, its two exhibits exist only on the road and, in the case of the pieces not touring, in storage.

In its early stages, the plan was to assemble a collection and then tour with it for a few years. After that, Newquist and his team thought they'd find a permanent home. The bookings kept coming, however, and so they still just keep jumping from city to city. (That'll keep happening, it seems. They're already booked into 2020.)

"The guitar is one of the most iconic artifacts or objects in the world," Newquist said. "Shakespeare wrote about the guitar. 'The Canterbury Tales' included tales of guitars. The history of the guitar itself goes back well over 500 years. But in America especially — it came over with the first Spanish explorers. With farm tools and guns, they came over with (instruments that were precursors to) guitars."

The exhibit is designed to tell the story of the instrument from its earliest incarnations to today. It's not packed with guitars played by famous people — you can find that kind of thing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland — but a few are scattered about. There's a Gibson Lucille played and signed by B.B. King, for instance.

"In terms of social fabric, there are more guitars sold than there are all other instruments combined," Newquist said. "There are 3 million guitars sold every year in America. If you take every drum set, every piano, every tuba, every flute, every keyboard — they don't even come close to 3 million."

The dozens of instruments are arrange in roughly chronological order, beginning with replicas of the earliest hand-held and stringed pieces, through the Rickenbacker (the first mass-produced electric guitar) to the most modern incarnations.

While Newquist didn't know how much the entire collection was worth, several of the guitars fall in the $10,000 to $50,000 range.

Others, like the encased air guitar, have far less value. 

"The response has been stunningly overwhelming," Newquist said. "We thought it would appeal certainly to guitar fans and to museums that focused on either history or science, but we found the entire breadth; pure science museums, pure history museums, nature museums. Everybody has some level of connection with a guitar." 


If you go

What: "Guitar: The Instrument That Rocked the World"

When: Opened Tuesday. Exhibit is on display through Jan 5. 

Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday

Where: History Museum at the Castle, 330 E. College Ave., Appleton

Admission: $12 adults, $7 children, free for ages 4 and younger



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