I just wished I would have been able to hold onto that guitar until today.
Special thanks to Collins Kirby of the New Orleans Cigar Box Guitar Festival and Greg Lambousy and the staff of the New Orleans Jazz Museum for making this interview possible.
CHAPTER 1: “Nobody Builds a Cigar Box Guitar Because They Want to Play Nice Things”
You simply don’t go down this road because you want to play another Fender® Strat. That music has been spun a million times over. This is a deeper quest.
If you’re you looking for a modern method of crafting a perfect guitar from a cigar box for playing fancy music, then you can stop right here. This is something different. This book is a quest for deeper music . . . deeper living. Deep.
For me, the story starts in 1993 at a period when the blues first hit me like a ton of bricks. As an amateur musician, hearing this music caused me to abandon thrash metal and punk for this older American art form. I think it was Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House” that started it for me. From there, I had to learn more about this music.
I started digging for more information. If Jimi Hendrix was so good, then who came before him? I unearthed Muddy Waters braggadocio hollers, Hound Dog Taylor’s gnarled slide, and Howlin’ Wolf’s howl. I kept on digging. Soon, I fell into a pit of the deep stuff . . . the Delta Blues of the 1920s and 30s. Blind Willie Johnson’s hellfire and damnation preaching, Mississippi John Hurt’s murder ballads sung with a smile, and Cryin’ Sam Collins’ sorrowful and out-of-tune “git-fiddle” guitar.
My apartment became filled with overdue Smithsonian Folkway records from the library. I had a cheap acoustic guitar and a ¾" (2 cm) socket guitar slide beside my bed that I would use to choke old blues songs I heard on the turntable. It was a constant struggle with my fingers cramping up after hours of playing.
The blues are dangerous and I wanted to dance with it. But I kept failing. That’s when I asked myself, what came before the Delta Blues? What was one step deeper?
At some point, I came across an interview with rockabilly legend Carl Perkins in which he described the very first guitar he owned:
“Before I went to school, I started fooling around on a guitar. My daddy made me one with a cigar box, a broomstick, and two strands of baling wire, and I’d sit and beat on that thing.” – Carl Perkins
It was a poor man’s guitar, built because he couldn’t afford a store-bought acoustic. In my imagination, it was the whining sound of desperation.
It was one step deeper.
I had to make my own just to see if this was the Holy Grail that I was searching for in my quest.
On July 4, 1993, I built my very first cigar box guitar. These photos (see here) are of the actual guitar. It was built from a plank of wood from my father’s barn, a cardboard Swisher Sweets box, three guitar tuners from a broken guitar, and three used guitar strings.
Perkins said his guitar had two strings, so I decided to make mine fancy and add a third string. When I strung it up, I immediately was able to play Sylvester Weaver’s blues classic “Guitar Rag,” a song that had earlier been the bane of my existence on my six-string acoustic. The three strings played with a slide made perfect sense to me, and the songs kept pouring out of the box.
I had found my instrument.
A cigar box guitar, in its most primal form, is broken to begin with. It shouldn’t work, but it still does. The sounds are otherworldly, like stepping inside the grooves of an old Victrola record. The box itself was crafted by manufacturers simply to hold 25 cigars, look enticing on a store counter, and carry a tax stamp. No thought was ever given to whether it would be acoustically tuned for performance.
And yet it has the exact sound and spirit I was looking for.
It’s been 25 years since I built that first cigar box guitar, and since then I’ve only slightly refined the style of that very first one. In the thousands of instruments I’ve built since that first one, I experimented with adding frets, pickups, and other elements.
The further I would push the idea, the more the muse would pull me back to the simple three-string slide style of the original Swisher Sweets guitar.
This not a gimmick guitar. It’s not about some educated egghead guitarist making cheeky viral videos while “slumming it” on a homemade cigar box guitar. It’s digging deep into the past to find the music that connects with your soul and then developing your own sound from it.
Let’s start digging.
A decade ago, I “retired” the Swisher Sweets cigar box guitar by hanging it at Unkl Ray’s Bar in Hinton, WV. Unfortunately, the iconic roadhouse closed several years later, but owner Ray Nutter kept my guitar preserved and in perfect condition. It was only after I started writing this book that I asked for its return. Within two days of my message to Ray, it was delivered to my front porch. Thanks, Ray. You’re the true Washboard Wizard. Let’s do a Jug Fusion reunion someday.
Guitarcheology: “The Horse’s Bridle” Two-String Guitar, Circa 1900
Measuring in at 30" (76 cm) long, 5" (12 ¾ cm) wide, and 3" (7 ½ cm) deep, this two- string guitar sports a body and neck that were crafted from one hunk of wood using hand tools.
The body cavity was completely carved. A soundboard made of 3/16" (½ cm) thin wood from the same stock was attached with nails. A house-shaped sound hole is carved near the floating bridge. It is strung with two gauges of fishing line.
The angled headstock has two hand- carved tuning pegs which still work great. The frets are small pieces of nickel and copper that have been hammered over the sides and positioned at an approximated do re mi scale, similar to a diatonic dulcimer fretboard.
To get a better idea on the frets, I called up Derick Kemper, my current harmonica player who is also a professional blacksmith. He took one look at the guitar and said, “The frets are definitely hand hammered of some kind, but the tailpiece that holds the strings is an actual horse’s bridle. I know because I just got back from shoeing horses!”
Take note at the wear marks on the face of the guitar. This instrument has been played . . . and played hard. Whoever built this definitely made the instrument they were searching for. The neck contains sweat marks and wear.
The guitar was discovered somewhere in New England. Amazingly, it is still very much playable.
1886 Newspaper Article: A Juvenile Sits on a Beer Keg and Gathers a Crowd
GALVESTON (TX) DAILY NEWS, THURSDAY, APRIL 15, 1886
Historic cigar box banjo plans, first published in 1886.