Obsessed With Cigar Box Guitars, 2nd Edition E-Book

David Sutton

• Herausgeber: CompanionHouse Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 128

Beschreibung

An unforgettable look inside the Cigar Box Guitar Revolution. Beautiful new color photographs of more than 120 amazing homemade musical instruments. Stunning profiles of DIY musical greatness, from two-string guitars and diddley bows to an electrified washtub bass. Authentic stories of legendary American roots music personalities. An expanded section on learning to play the cigar box guitar using both innovative and traditional techniques.

Leseprobe

OBSESSED WITH CIGAR BOX

GUITARS

2ND EDITION

Obsessed with Cigar Box Guitars, 2nd Edition

CompanionHouse Books™ is an imprint of Fox Chapel Publishers International Ltd.

Project Team

Vice President–Content: Christopher Reggio

Editor: Anthony Regolino

Design: David Fisk

Index: Johanna Egert

All photos © David B. Sutton unless otherwise noted.

Shutterstock photo sources: page 3 (background), sarayut jun-ngam; page 160, beeboys; page 163, photobeps.

Obsessed with Cigar Box Guitars, 2nd Edition (2019) is a revised edition of An Obsession with Cigar Box Guitars (2013), published by Fox Chapel Publishing Company, Inc. New edition includes a section devoted to ukuleles, filled with photographs.

Copyright © 2013, 2019 by David Sutton and Fox Chapel Publishers International Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Fox Chapel Publishers, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

ISBN 978-1-62008-313-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sutton, David, 1958- author.

Title: Obsessed with cigar box guitars / David Sutton.

Other titles: Obsession with cigar box guitars

Description: 2nd edition. | Mount Joy, PA : CompanionHouse, 2019. | Revision of the author’s An obsession with cigar box guitars. | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018053588 (print) | LCCN 2018054437 (ebook) | ISBN 9781620083147 (ebook) | ISBN 9781620083130 (softcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Cigar box guitar--Pictorial works.

Classification: LCC ML1015.G9 (ebook) | LCC ML1015.G9 S887 2019 (print) | DDC 787.87/1920222--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053588

This book has been published with the intent to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter within. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the author and publisher expressly disclaim any responsibility for any errors, omissions, or adverse effects arising from the use or application of the information contained herein.

Fox Chapel Publishing

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We are always looking for talented authors. To submit an idea, please send a brief inquiry to [email protected].

Printed and bound in Singapore

20 19 18 172 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

OBSESSED WITH CIGAR BOX

GUITARS

OVER 120 HAND-BUILT GUITARS FROM THE MASTERS

2ND EDITION

DAVID SUTTON

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Guitars

The Ukulele

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Index

“Perhaps we’re so consumed by our consumer culture that we tend to think of guitars as impossibly complex devices that somebody else has to build. One of the many beauties of the cigar box guitar is that it shatters this myth.”

INTRODUCTION

When I tell people about my previous book, Cigar Box Guitars, the conversation often goes like this:

“I wrote a book called Cigar Box Guitars.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about (dramatic pause) cigar box guitars.”

“What’s a cigar box guitar?”

“It’s a guitar. Made from…a cigar box. You make it yourself.”

Puzzled stare.“How many strings does a cigar box guitar have?”

“It depends on how many you put on it.”

Again, the puzzled stare.“Really now. What is a cigar box guitar?”

A cigar box guitar is a simple stringed instrument that you build yourself, usually by poking a dowel, board, or stick through a discarded wooden cigar box and then outfitting it with guitar strings. For a lot of builders and enthusiasts, the cigar box guitar then becomes a point of departure to begin making music.

Even at this stage, some people still give me that puzzled look. Perhaps we’re so consumed by our consumer culture that we tend to think of guitars as impossibly complex devices that somebody else has to build. One of the many beauties of the cigar box guitar is that it shatters this myth.

You see, while stringed instruments are bound by certain laws of physics, the golden rule of cigar box guitar building is that there are no rules. There’s no right way, no master plan, no industry standard for the design. Each instrument is its own unique answer to the question: What is a cigar box guitar?

Let’s take a look at the physical heart of the matter for another possible answer.

It’s likely it all started with a taut cord.

Perhaps, as some writers have suggested, that cord was part of an archer’s bow. Some musically attuned hunter or warrior must have liked the sound made by that bowstring when it caused the air around it to vibrate. He may have noticed how the pitch changed with the tension of the string.

I imagine some off-duty archer noodling out a tune on his bowstring while bracing one end of the bow against a log or a board. The vibrations transferred to the wood produced a louder sound. Now imagine that the bow was braced against a hollow log. Suddenly the sound was quite a bit louder, amplified and focused by the vibrations of the air inside the hollow log.

This simple yet playable modern-day diddley bow by an unknown builder is made from barn wood, a whiskey bottle, and a ceramic insulator.

From a physical standpoint, that’s really all there is to a cigar box guitar: a taut, vibrating cord (usually a steel guitar string); a vibrating wooden surface over a hollow, resonating chamber (usually a wooden cigar box); and a point of contact between the string and the wood (called the bridge).

Let’s leave our imaginary archer now and fast-forward to the United States of America, late in the nineteenth century.

In many parts of the country, people didn’t have much. The idea of dropping $3,700 (£2909) at Guitar Works on a Collings or a Taylor belonged to the distant, unimaginable future.

But people still made music. It’s like they needed to make music, and we humans are a resourceful lot.

In a world without manufactured guitars, a person could hammer two nails into a board and stretch a strand of wire pulled from a screen door tightly between the nails. Ramming a block of wood under one end would give the wire still more tension.

Plucking that wire or striking it with a stick would cause the wire to vibrate. As the wire vibrated, it would cause the air around it to vibrate, and a sweet, simple tone would resonate. Moving an empty bottle or a piece of pipe along the string while plucking would change the length of the vibrating section of wire. That, in turn, would change the wavelength of the airborne vibrations, which would vary the pitch of that tone. Adding in a little rhythm would be enough to get people singing and dancing.

Ethnomusicologists define this primitive, one-stringed instrument as a monochord zither. Colloquially, it’s more often called a diddley bow.

The diddley bow’s drawback is its limited volume. The volume can be pumped up a bit by wedging a jar or can under the string to act as a resonating chamber, but that, too, has limits. Fortunately for our mid-nineteenth century musicians, help was on the way.

While the details of its history may be a bit sketchy—objects this humble don’t get much play in the history books—we have enough information to speculate about the cigar box guitar’s origins.

In the early nineteenth century, cigars were shipped in barrels or bundled in smaller quantities in pig bladders. The mid-nineteenth century saw the introduction of the cedar cigar box, tailor-made to hold twenty-five cigars in three rows—eight in the bottom row, nine in the middle row, and eight again on top.

An etching titled Home, sweet home by Edwin Forbes, circa 1876, shows a winter camp scene during the Civil War and is cited as the earliest documentation of cigar box instruments.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

In order to help fund the Civil War, President Lincoln’s congress began taxing a broad range of consumer goods, including cigars. Tax stamps were issued for fixed quantities of cigars, and the cedar 8/9/8 box, sealed with a U.S. tax stamp, rapidly became, and remains, the industry standard for packaging cigars.

Cedar keeps cigars fresh. As luck would have it, cedar also makes an excellent tone wood. In fact, it’s sometimes used in fine guitar building. It didn’t take long before someone figured out that those little boxes, emptied of cigars, made ideal resonating chambers to amplify vibrating strings. Cigar boxes were soon pressed into service by resourceful instrument builders.

With the addition of a string or two, and sometimes a horsehair bow, builders could have a playable guitar or fiddle. Indeed, the earliest definitive reference we have of a cigar box instrument is a print of a Civil War soldier drawing a bow across a cigar box fiddle.

Americans built and played cigar box guitars and fiddles throughout the first half of the twentieth century. They remained common right up through World War II. In fact, in some of earlier Peanuts comic strips from the ’50s, Charlie Brown played a cigar box guitar. Throughout this book are Vintage Spotlights on preserved antique builds from decades—even centuries—ago. Because of the cigar box guitar’s humble origins, most builders of these instruments remain unknown.

Despite their popularity, however, as we moved toward the ’60s, cigar box guitars all but disappeared from the scene.

What happened to cigar box guitars?

After World War II, American culture took a dramatic shift toward consumerism and, specifically, the mass consumption of manufactured goods. We entered an era where Americans began looking down their noses at the humble and the homemade. Guitars became something people bought from Sears or Montgomery Ward.

But if cigar box guitars had disappeared altogether, you would not be holding this book. Something stimulated a twenty-first century revival of this nearly extinct bit of populist culture. What happened?

This might be a good time to talk about my own introduction to cigar box guitars and to look at how I became the chief propaganda minister of this musical revolution.

Moses Williams plays the diddley bow for a group of boys in Waverly, Florida, sometime before 1982.

State Archi ves of Flori da, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/115533, Peggy A. Bulger

In 2006, when she was about five years old, my daughter began taking an interest in my guitars. I wanted her to have a guitar of her own. My father had told me about cigar box guitars when I was a kid, but I didn’t have much more to go on other than this vague concept. I began poking around the Internet to see if I could find some ideas.

My search engines turned up perhaps two modest references to cigar box guitars. I had imagined something made from a cardboard box and rubber bands, but instead I found instructions for building playable guitars capable of making real music.

Using wooden cigar boxes, pieces of 1" x 2" (2.5 x 5cm) maple salvaged from a neighbor’s rehab project, used guitar tuners, bolts, guitar strings, and some glue, I built my daughter and myself a pair of three-string guitars. They made a surprisingly pleasing sound, and building them was a lot of fun.

I built another cigar box guitar after that, and then another, trying slightly different approaches with each build to solve problems I’d encountered in the construction of my previous builds. After five guitars, I set building aside for a while.

Several years later, browsing through a book called The Little Book of Whittling, I noticed a brief message on the copyright page: something like, if you have an idea for a woodworking book, we want to hear about it.

I sent Fox Chapel Publishing an email with pictures of the guitars I’d built, along with some samples of my writing. My timing was fortuitous. Several conversations later, my idea for a modest how-to pamphlet had grown into a concept for a hundred-page book that would contain not only three illustrated how-to-build sections, but also a photo gallery of cigar box instruments and profiles of people who build and play cigar box guitars.

I soon discovered that a lot of other people had become curious about cigar box guitars during the years since I had first looked into the subject. By 2010, a huge, vibrant, international cigar box guitar community had blossomed. Thousands of builders were now busy not just building guitars, but also interacting across websites, blogs, social networking sites, eBay, YouTube, and at festivals around the country.

The materials I gathered for our hundred-page book about this humble, homemade musical instrument ultimately filled more than two hundred pages—and now a second book!

What happened to create this explosion of interest in a primitive musical instrument that had been on the brink of extinction? Call it synchronicity—a confluence of characters and conditions.

It does not surprise me that this sudden explosion of interest in homemade fun coincided with the implosion of the U.S. economy in 2008. Perhaps a lot of people who had been buying or thinking about buying expensive, boutique-built guitars suddenly found themselves without the resources to do so. Their priorities shifted. With so many Americans in the same financial boat, the idea of banging on something humble and homemade became less shameful. It took on a different air.

A huge population of dream-deferring baby boomers, who’d grown up knowing they were born to rock, found themselves with empty nests, a little bit of time on their hands, and fifty- to sixty-year-old faces looking back at them from their bathroom mirrors saying, “Now or never.” This latent revolution just needed a catalyst, and it soon got one.

Just a few years before the economic downturn, a man named Shane Speal had embraced the cigar box guitar with a truly religious fervor. Speal began laying the groundwork for a musical revolution with missionary zeal.

From the age of eight, Speal had played guitar. When he finished high school, he decided that he wanted to be a minister, so he enrolled in a bible college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He says he was “big into Christian rock” at the time, but soon found that style of music a little “too plastic” for his taste.

My obsession with cigar box guitars began as I built two: one for me and one for my daughter.

After a year, he transferred to Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and it was there that he discovered the blues. Speal says after discovering Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page, he wanted to know who had influenced them. “You take one step back and you get Muddy Waters and Hound Dog Taylor. Who influenced them? You take one step back and you get Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson.” Nothing if not thorough, Speal then wanted to know who had influenced those guys—the very earliest blues men. What was that “one step deeper than the delta blues”? He couldn’t find any leads. Their predecessors predated recorded music.

Then Shane Speal discovered the cigar box guitar.

I spoke with Speal in 2010 about his discovery and about his unusual passion for this humble instrument:

SPEAL:

A friend of mine gave me a bunch of his dad’s old Guitar Player magazines. There was an article from 1976. It was how to build [a cigar box guitar] based on a Carl Perkins interview with Guitar Player. Carl Perkins started out on a two-string cigar box guitar. Some guy made a really crude version of it and published it in Guitar Player magazine. I went nuts.

SUTTON:

A minute ago you said you had thought you wanted to be a preacher. Now you’re preaching the cigar box guitar gospel. How did that come about?

SPEAL: