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Back to home pageCigar Box Guitar CD Delta Blues & Dust Bowl Ballads~NEW Release~ Cigar Box Guitar BottleNeck Slide
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Seller assumes all responsibility for this listing.Item number: 160449149216
Last updated on Jan 24, 2012 04:40:03 PST View all revisions
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Well, what is a Cigar Box Guitar??????...........The truth is, in the South It's common to hear stories that B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Lightin' Hopkins and all those other old-time blues cats started playing guitar on a cigar box guitar. Not many people who follow Blues and Country music know but, many famous Bluesmen and Country singers started their career on a simple homemade cigar box guitar. One reason most Blues and Country music has such a distinctive sound is because it was derived off of music made on these simple instruments.
To most Americans it's a little know fact that those "po' boys" of the years gone by played the Cigar Box Guitar. Well, now you know, this is how they did it...This ain't “Close, but no cigar”....This is following completely in their footsteps with Historical Civil War Era Roots. Cigar Box Guitars are great for a Killer Vintage National Oahu supro or valco sound without plugin' in effects or being reduced to buying an Asian made guitar. Most Acoustics, Resonators, Flattops, Lap Steels and Banjos can't even come close to the true primitive Southern Delta sound these guitars make. These instruments can be channeled into a creativity that many musicians desire for a more primal sound. Blues guitarists, in particular, really enjoy playing cigar box guitars in a search of playing Delta Blues in its purest form.
Boy's Life Magazine circa 1936
Cigar Box Guitars? Why my pursuit of perfection in building this type of instrument??? I do it in inspiration of old images I see in Americas New Orleans Union and Confederate, along with Black and White people, everyone was trying to move on with lives together.
This early time in America was a difficult time for Black Americans. They made a whole culture of there pain, we know it as the "Blues". Music was a great and important aspect of early American life. However, when black Americans were given there first view of freedom it was the 1870's and America America
It's now a forgotten part of our history, but when enslaved Africans were brought to this country before the 1800's, they came without possessions, but not without their culture. In their memories, their customs, and their ways of looking at their world, they carried their cultural arts with them enslaved to America New World , as Africans and Europeans mixed together and began to build the American way of life. African music, rooted in a distinctive musical tradition, was one of the most important of these cultural arts. The majority of their music was based on simple stringed instruments such as their "banjar"{a gourd with a neck and strings from Africa } which is thought to be the precursor of the American stringed guitar the "Banjo". The best known written accord of this early guitar is probably that of Thomas Jefferson in 1781: "The instrument proper to them {i.e. the slaves} is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa ." But because enslaved people didn't have access to their native instruments they quickly adapted and built their own. At the time the basis of this guitar was the cigar box.
The use of a stringed instrument was also a necessity because slaves had many gatherings that called for and involved music. The cigar box guitar was used as an integrated part of there "cakewalk" celebration before it left the plantation and became popularized by whites.{it was a common religious slaves event were one would put a cake in the middle of the floor and dance around it to music, the best dance (or imitation of there master) would win the cake; an expression that transpired into the American expression "easy as a Cakewalk" i.e.-to be easy or fun or "takes the cake" -to win} The use of this stringed guitar slowly after time made its way into the mainstream of our Southern culture. Being spread from plantation to plantation it eventually evolved into and led to the creation of "The American Banjo". This in turn at the same time in popularizing the use of the steel-string guitar in our culture. This was a fad that slowly spread eastward to the cities and streets of American big cities and clubs (referred to as "parlors" at that time) It helped create the basis of guitar and eventually musically transformed itself again and led to the rise and use of the "Parlor guitar".
During this time the cigar box guitar was influencing all types of folk music which was sweeping thru underground American culture. In the "Root's", however, at the same time as the guitars popularity slowly rose in America, without money or true freedom, a slave, sharecropper, or impoverished person living in the countryside couldn't simply go down to the store and buy a guitar. Thus recreating the cycle of need to make your own guitar. Making a "home-made" guitar was the only choice for the impoverished. This tradition continued for decades among the poor for most of the late 1800's up till and thru the 1930's Depression Era.
what does the 1880's sound like???
Many of the people who built these curious guitars went on to become American best know Blues and Rock stars of the day. Rock 'n Roll pioneer Carl Perkins reminisced about his childhood cigar box guitar that he made with a box, stick and baling wire. Years later, he would take the knowledge he first learned on that down-home axe to create "Blue Suede Shoes." That sure got Elvis to stand up strait the first time he heard that, after that HE WAS HOOKED on the BLUES!!! "Beans" Hambone, Blind Willie Johnson, and Charlie Christian, are actually some of the people who have been known to even record with this amazing instrument. Not only that, because most of these basic guitars usually didn't have frets, the po' folk needed a way to play them......That is what is thought to be the creation of slide guitar in the Southern Delta.
The precursor to the cigar box guitar as an instrument was the diddly-bow. It was a one stringed instrument where you would take a Coke bottle or Rum neck and run it up and down a string to achieve the tone you’re after. Those crude instruments along with the cigar box guitar is what melded into the form of slide guitar were familiar with today. From Son House, Robert Johnson, to Muddy Waters and Elmore James they were all influenced in some way by these instruments following in there career as slide players. That’s where the blues and slide guitar truly started at. On those plantations and cotton fields the cigar box guitar and 'field hollerin' went hand in hand. Blues players didn't play Gibsons, Resophonic or Weissenborn! They couldn't afford them. B.B. King growing up a poor Cotton sharecroppers son dreamed of buying his first guitar from the Sears catalog, After going to the local 5 and Dime his father knew he didn’t even have enough money for even food much less $2 for a used Stella guitar, His only option was to "hit" the shed, and it's well documented he made his son's first guitar from a simple cigar box. It's also been quoted that a schoolmate of the Legendary Blues guitarist Charlie Christian, said:
Taken form a direct quote from Lightin' Hopkins was;
This story about what would make a poor person use a cigar box for a guitar in the first place began in the mid 1800's .....The Cigar boxes that were familiar with didn’t exist prior to the 1840’s. Prior to then, cigars were shipped in larger crates containing 100 or more per case. But after 1842, due to exploration of the "West" cigar manufacturers started using smaller, more portable boxes with only 20-50 cigars per box. In the Old West, as well as most of the 19th cigars were extremely popular, card games, Saloon'n and of coarse those great Mississippi Paddleboats helped spread them throughout the south. Because of the widespread popularity of smoking in those days, many empty cigar boxes would be just laying around. Unlike times are today, the 1800’s was a simpler time for Americans, when necessity was truly the mother of invention. Being that most American music was based off of stringed instruments, using a cigar box to create a guitar, fiddle, or a banjo was an obvious choice for a few crafty souls. The earliest proof of a instrument made from a cigar box that has been found is an etching of two Civil War Soldiers at a campsite with one playing a cigar box instrument as another tired soldier relaxed near by to listen. Those humble beginnings are what eventually gave the Cigar box Guitar a home in music history....Now even the Smithsonian Museum In Washington D.C. has an early homemade Cigar Box Guitar on display c.1861 to show Americans true pride and the roots of all our guitar-playin' Soul--- Now that’s the Cigar Box Blues Baby!
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Item location: CAROLINA, PR, United States
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