Mount Rushmore, as a tribute to a profession

It’s sort of a game: Which four people should be ensconced in much larger-than-life stone sculptures on the side of a mountain (preferably an ugly mountain that is not sacred to any First Nation, but I digress)?

Found a puzzle slanted toward a Rushmore of science, featuring Einstein, Curie, Newton and Darwin.

Puzzle created by Discover, honoring four greats of science.

You can purchase the puzzle at MyScienceShop.com.

We’ve featured the Rushmore of Chicago blues here before, Mount Bluesmore, featured in Buddy Guy’s Legends bar and music venue. I understand the painting moved when Legends moved.

Mount Bluesmore, in the old Legends venue: Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf.

Heck, this could be a great game: Name four people in any profession, art, field of endeavor, who should be featured on a Mount Rushmore-style monument. Above we’ve got science and Chicago blues. On the real Mount Rushmore, we’ve got the Rushmore of U.S. Presidents.

The real Rushmore, in South Dakota. It features Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln, left to right. National Park Service image.

What other monuments could we have? Painting? Picasso and Rembrandt . . . but there are so many.

Renaissance painting. Abstract painting. Landscapes, portrait painters. Architects. Rock musicians. Classical musicians. Baseball. Football. American football. Fiction authors. Engineers. Women scientists. Tuskegee airmen (that would be tough; every one of them deserve it).

Who do you nominate, for what field?  Put nominations in comments. Include pictures if you find one. 

Others have played this game: 

Rushmore of Disastrous Presidents, featuring Trump, Hoover, George W. Bush, and Richard Nixon. By Dan Adel for Vanity Fair magazine.

Adel’s original, in 2007, featured Warren G. Harding in place of Trump.

Vanity Fair’s Disastrous Presidents Rushmore, in 2007, by artist Dan Adel, adding Warren G. Harding, before Trump.

A ghost Rushmore, featuring Native American leaders:

Four Native Americans posed as alternatives for Rushmore. (Challenge: Can you accurately identify the four? Please do.)

A classical music proposal (would you choose differently?)”

Left to right, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. Gagambo, at Deviant Art.

Sioux tribes have undertaken a drive to respond to what many consider a desecration of their sacred lands, with a massive monument to Crazy Horse, still being carved, and incredibly impressive (if you visit, spend a lot of time at the museum):

More: 

• Artist Jason Hunt pictures a “Black Hills” sculpture, featuring Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and W. E. B. Dubois
• Buddy Guy worries about the future of the blues, interview with NPR

Tribute to Sonny Boy Williamson at the Chicago Blues Festival, 2010:

Buddy Guy’s Legends will move: Will Mount Bluesmore move, too?

Chicago blues legend Buddy Guy is moving his club, Buddy Guy’s Legends.  Guy’s club announced the move last September.

Buddy Guy's Legends, image from Today's Chicago Blues

We visited the club four years ago during the giant Midwest Clinic, where Duncanville’s Wind Ensemble debuted a tribute to Rosa Parks just a few days after her death (Samuel R. Hazo’s “Today Is the Gift”) and *spent a memorable evening going slightly deaf to the Kinsey Report.

Following federal law on how blues club should be, the walls tell stories of blues past, blues well-remembered, good blues players who visited, and stories of blues in general.  A neophyte can get a good education just looking at the walls in a good club.  One wall wore a painting of what could have been Mount Rushmore, which piqued my history radar — but in place of Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln, it had Chicago blues legends:  Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf.

Who knows the history of the image?  Did Buddy Guy hire it done?  Did someone do it as a serious tribute?  Was it an image done for a show in the distant past, just pasted onto the wall?

When I heard the club was moving, I feared for the thing, especially since I was not digital at the time and didn’t get a photo of it.  To my shock, I couldn’t find any images on the internet.

Then a couple of days ago I ran across a version of the the image, at Today’s Chicago Blues.  It’s appropriately called “Mount Bluesmore.”

But the same question remains:  Will it be saved with the new venue?

Mount Bluesmore, at Buddy Guy's Legends, Chicago - image from Today's Chicago Blues

Tip of the old scrub brush to Today’s Chicago Blues — go buy the book.

The Kinsey Report:

*  This isn’t blues, below, but it’s worth a listen; I believe it may even be Duncanville’s premiere of Hazo’s tribute to Rosa Parks — alas, without video of the band, and lacking a little on the bass end but otherwise showing off the Wind Ensemble’s performance flair: