10-03-2025
World-famous guitar collection on display Tuesday in Burlington
A legendary collection of guitars will be on display Tuesday at Christ the King School in Burlington.
The Blue Guitar Collection honors famous guitar builder, Jimmy D'Aquisto, who died in April 1995 at age 59. D'Aquisto was a teenager when he started learning the art of building archtop guitars in the 1950s, when he became an apprentice to John D'Angelico, considered the grandfather of archtop guitar construction.
Today, D'Aquito's deluxe models routinely sell for well over $100,000 and are coveted by collectors around the world.
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In 1995, one of those collectors, Scott Chinery, asked more than 20 respected luthiers to each build a guitar in tribute to D'Aquisto. The only rules: The guitar had to be an 18-inch archtop (hollow acoustic or semi-acoustic guitars that are favored by many jazz guitarists); and it had to be the exact shade of blue as D'Aquisto's Blue Centura Deluxe.
At the time, Chinery, who died in 2000, said the goal was to bring the best guitar-builders together to interpret the same guitar. 'All of these great luthiers saw this as a friendly competition, and as a result they went beyond anything they'd ever done,' he said. 'We ended up with a collection of the greatest archtop guitars ever made.'
The Blue Guitar Collection was displayed at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History from November 1997 through October 1998. After Chinery's passing in 2000, the guitars were passed along to The Archtop Foundation, which as part of its mission, exhibits the collection at shows, museums, and schools.
Tuesday's exhibit starts at 9 a.m.
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