Eddie Van Halen has been honor by The National Guitar Museum with their Lifetime Achievement Award.
In a statement on the honor, The National Guitar Museum said, “Every year for more than a decade, The National GUITAR Museum has given our ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ to a living guitarist who has contributed to the legacy of the guitar. The guidelines are straightforward: the person must have been a performing or recording artist whose talents had an effect on guitar playing—and whose career inspired and influenced other guitar players. This year, the year of the pandemic, has given us reason to make an exception to our annual presentation. For 2020, we are recognizing Eddie Van Halen as the recipient of our Lifetime Achievement Award. It is being awarded, for the first time, in memorial.”
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The museum continued, “It is perhaps fitting that we don’t need to explain why Eddie is deserving of such an honor—everyone who has ever heard his guitar playing knows. Eddie certainly would have received this award at some point in the future, as it seemed that he still had a lifetime of guitar greatness to give.”
The museum’s statement concluded, “Several of the people we’ve honored over the past decade have left us in the years since we presented them with the award. In this case, however, the sadness of Eddie Van Halen’s passing is somehow harder to accept. Thanks, Eddie. We only wish we could deliver this in person.”