Woody Guthrie Center Welcomes Traveling Beatles Exhibit This Week

The traveling exhibit on the Fab Four will be on display from Wednesday through June

 

Article by Jerry Wofford, Tulsa World, Sunday, February 1, 2015

 

Beatlemania is taking over the Woody Guthrie Center. Tulsa is hosting the next stop on the Grammy Museum’s traveling exhibit on

the Beatles, with artifacts and exhibits on the Fab Four’s early days in Liverpool to their appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and

through the massive shift in pop culture that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr ushered in.

 

“You get to see things you’ve never seen before about the Beatles,” said Chris Morrison, a curator for the Grammy Museum and one

of the exhibit’s curators. “The hardcore Beatles fans will probably come first thing in the morning and stay all day.”

 

“Ladies and Gentlemen ... The Beatles!” opens Wednesday at the Woody Guthrie Center, 102 E. M.B. Brady St. It will be on display through June.

 

The exhibit, made up of artifacts collected by Fab Four Exhibits LLC, is the second Grammy exhibit to visit Tulsa after it was announced

that the Woody Guthrie Center would be the first Grammy Museum affiliate last year.

 

It’s the fourth stop for the exhibit, which debuted last year in New York City to mark the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ first appearance

on the Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964. It was a turning point in American culture, changing how people looked at music, pop culture

and celebrity, Morrison said.

 

The exhibit includes a looping documentary that features musicians talking about the Beatles’ influence, and according to Morrison,

Ozzy Osborne said it best: “One day you go to bed and you live in one world, and you wake up the next and it’s a brand-new world.

That’s what it was like for teenagers at the time.”

 

What the exhibit hopes to show is some of how that happened. Included in the collection are early setlists and photos from even before

the Beatles formed into the band they’re known as today, when they still wore leather jackets and slicked-back hair.

 

It charts their journey from landing in America, their appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” (with a replica of the stage setup for
that show) and their travels around the country, met at each stop by hordes of screaming fans.

 

Several interactive exhibits allow fans to explore that history on a richer level.

 

And an interactive drum kit features drum lessons from Starr, recorded and designed by the Grammy Museum.

 

“I’ve been around these for just over a year, and I’m still peering closer at an item and studying it,” Morrison said.

 

And Deana McCloud, executive director of the Woody Guthrie Center, said the connections between the Beatles and the museum’s

namesake aren’t overt but reach deep to look at how both were able to make change with art.

 

“We’re all about the way the arts can make change in a society,” McCloud said. “The way you make change in a society is through creativity.”

 

The impacts the Beatles and Woody Guthrie had on music and culture were different, but both were far-reaching. And even musically,

Guthrie was a well-known collaborator with the Delta blues and folk musician Lead Belly.

 

“George Harrison has said without Lead Belly, there would be no Beatles,” McCloud said. Two degrees of Woody Guthrie.

Having the work and history of the Beatles in the same place as Guthrie’s entire archive makes a unique atmosphere to learn from

both, McCloud said.