Cigar box guitars really shouldn’t work, but they do—magnificently. They’re the only instrument I use in my band.
Shane Speal & the Snakes plays mostly dive bars in rural Pennsylvania. Our fans follow us in hardcore devotion from show to show, because they never know what’s gonna happen at the next gig. When you play 100% homemade instruments, something is bound to get destroyed at any moment. There are always two rolls of duct tape on stage just in case a repair is needed.
Add the fact that we never use a set list. The entire three-hour concert is spent wrestling uncompromising instruments and feeding off the audience’s energy. Our shows sometimes contain reworked songs as diverse as Blind Willie Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Muddy Waters, Depeche Mode, and Led Zeppelin. Some nights our songs are developed on the spot.
And there’s always danger ahead. The gig is either a masterpiece or it’s a train wreck. One night, a bar had a blackboard in the bathroom where somebody scrawled: “This band is HORRIBLE!” Another person scratched out “HORRIBLE” and wrote “AWESOME.” And THAT completely sums up my music.
So what is this all about? Why cigar box guitars with their out-of-tune janglings? Why gutbucket basses and their warbling thuds?
As you dig into this book, you’ll realize it’s not a gimmick for me.
It’s my life.
There are two types of projects in this book. The first lists all the parts, tools, and instructions, along with photos. The second is Builders’ Diaries, which chronicle unique instruments that were created in the past, usually on a whim, and were designed without any structured plan. I include them here to inspire you to try your own inventions.
Foreword
Little Freddie King’s Cigar Box Guitar: A Bluesman’s Firsthand Account
On January 17, 2017, I had the opportunity to interview 77-year-old blues legend Little Freddie King on stage at the New Orleans Jazz Museum and learn about the cigar box guitar he built when he was only six years old. King’s face lit up when we talked and every detail was as vivid in his memory as if it just happened earlier that day.
Me: I hear that when you were a little kid, you started out making your own instruments.
Little Freddie King: For sure, because I was so poor, I couldn’t afford to buy my own guitar.
Me: Where were you living and how old were you at the time?
L.F.K.: Macomb Mississippi. I was six years old.
Now, my dad, he used to play all the time. He’d get off from work and come straight home and run up on the porch and go in the living room to the far corner and pick his guitar up and run back on the porch. He’d sit in his special rocking chair and would start a-rockin’, playing guitar. I said, “Daddy, why don’t you learn me how to play?”
He said, “Boy, I can’t learn you how to play, but I can show you three chords and you have to learn yourself how to play.”
My dad used to work up in the Mississippi Delta, he’d go up there and pick cotton. While he was goin’ up there, I was getting real busy taking his guitar from the corner and banging on it, trying to learn how to play. I kept bangin’ on his guitar, and I broke a string on it. I said, “Uh oh, I know I got it coming now!”
So here he come that evening, wide open and running there, grab the guitar and back to the front porch and jumped in his rocking chair. He banged down on it . . . and there was no string at the bottom—not as many notes, you know? He said, “Boy, get here!”
I said, “Uh oh.” [Laughs] I said, “What’s the matter, Daddy?”
He said, “You know what’s the matter! You done broke my damn guitar!”
I said, “What? I didn’t do that, Daddy!”
He said, “Boy, don’t you lie to me. Come here.” He went and got a rattan vine. Man, I tell you the truth, when he finished me with that rattan vine, that learnt me not to fool with his guitar anymore!
So I said, “I’m gonna have to do something to get me a guitar. I ain’t gonna fool with his guitar anymore because he’d likely kill me.”
In the next couple days, my mama said to me, “Sonny, you wanna go to the store for Mama?”
I said, “Yeah, Mama.”
So she sent me to the store . . . Where I’m from, they only had gravel roads . . . So here comes two big shots in an Eldorado Fleetwood Cadillac . . . dust was flyin’ . . . When the dust settled, I saw they tossed something out the window. I looked down in a ditch and it was a cigar box.
I said, “Wow, that’s just what I need to make my own guitar so I won’t have to get no whoopin’ no more!” So I get down in the ditch and get that old cigar box out of there and go on home.
I said, “Now I got to make my own guitar.”
I got to thinkin’ that I didn’t have no saw or mechanical tools or carpentry tools to build with.
So I crushed an old Coca Cola bottle [to make a homemade knife] and whittled me a round hole in the center of it.
Then I said, “I got to paint it and glue it together,” but I didn’t have none of that nor money to do it, so I went to this pine tree that’s got that rosin coming out of it. So I got some rosin and put it in a cup, put it on the stove, and melted it. Then I went to the chimney . . . that had soot that was black, and I took that and melted with the rosin. And it made it black. [Using the cooked rosin concoction], I glued it together and painted it black.
I said, “What am I going to do for the neck and the frets?”
So around the house, we had a picket fence. So I ran out there and grabbed a picket and snatched it off the fence and took the same piece of glass and whittled it down. Then I put it on the cigar box. So then I said, “I got to make the frets.” I thought about the hay wire outside. So I went out and got some hay wire, the smallest hay wire I could find. I took it, cut it, and glued it down on the “keyboard.” I then took another piece of wire to the stove and got it red hot and then marked the holes at the end of [the headstock] to make my tuners.
I said, “Now I got my cigar box guitar, but I don’t have no strings!” So my daddy came for lunch and he used to make this homemade corn liquor called “buck.” You drink a pint of that and you’ll be drunk for seven days! And so he’d go back there and get charged up on that buck and he tied the horse to the pole. And the horse started stomping and kickin’ his tail as he was swatting horse flies. And I heard the sound of his tail moving in the air. “Woosh! Woosh! Woosh!”
I said to myself. “He made that tail sound through the air, so I wonder what it would sound like on my guitar.”
I went out to the horse and he looked at me. I said “I ain’t gonna bother you. I just want to take a hair and see what it will do on my guitar.” So I pull one strand out. I put that on [the guitar] and it made a sound. So I went back to the horse and he looked at me again. I said, “I’m back again and I want five more strings from you, horse.” So I kept pullin’, pullin’, pullin’ till he had a great big bald spot in his tail! [Laughs!]
Born Fread Eugene Martin in 1940, Little Freddie King has been a pillar of the New Orleans music community since moving there in