Ravi Shankar Sitar, Rikhi Ram

Ravi Shankar's performances of Hindustani classical sitar music in the West had a profound influence on musicians from John and Alice Coltrane to violinist Yehudi Menuhin to George Harrison and the Beatles. Shankar's appearances at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and Woodstock in 1969 added fuel to the craze for sitar sounds in psychedelic rock. Shankar owned and played this sitar and gave it to Mercury Records executive Shelby Singleton as a gift on a trip to American in the early 1960s.