new birth new orleans performance 3/11/06

This was a performance I created with the help of the Studio in the Woods, starring the New Birth Brass Band, on 3/11/06. I created this work because it was still too quiet here and still too wrecked and still in need of that sound that lifts. The performance went on through the and members' home neighborhoods and then to preservation hall, then on the air at WWOZ down at their temp digs in the French Market.

this summer...

coming this summer:
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I have a guitar going into the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Archive!


for 2009:

I'm creating two different series
paper covered wood boxes for $89
and high end polished wood boxes for $139
and standardizing the soundhole into a fleur de lis

each will come with a shoestring strap
and I will have slides available for purchase/inclusion

jazzfest 2008

2008 booth (1)

2008 booth (2)


out front of booth

playin!

close up of guitars

jazzfest 2007

This was the Fortier gym floor....

the necks still have the baketball paint on them...

this one's for godmother Lisa...

this was my 2007 booth...

The Cigar Box Guitar

The GREEN TEXT is mine and the WHITE TEXT is from Wikipedia.Org

The cigar box guitar is a primitive chordophone whose resonator
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(soundbox)
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is a discarded cigar box. Because the instrument is homemade, there is no standard for dimensions, string types or construction techniques. Many early cigar box guitars consisted only of one or two strings that were attached to the ends of a broomstick that was inserted into the cigar box. Other cigar box guitars were more complex, with the builder attempting to simulate a real stringed instrument, such as a guitar, banjo, or fiddle.

According to Dr. Tony Hyman, curator of the National Cigar Museum, cigar boxes as we know them didn’t exist prior to the 1840s. Until then, cigars were shipped in larger crates containing 100 or more per case. But after 1840, cigar manufacturers started using smaller, more portable boxes with 20-50 cigars per box.
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The panic of 1837, described as an early version of a predatory lending tactic-induced financial crisis, caused a pre-war recession; among the casualties: the excesses of bankers who could no longer afford large crates of cigars and reshaped the market sales unit into smaller boxes (gone were the days of crates of cigars) and more notably, Edgar Allen Poe's tenure at the Southern Literary Messenger magazine
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Cigars were extremely popular in the 19th Century, and therefore, many empty cigar boxes would be lying around the house. The 1800s were also a simpler time for Americans, when necessity was truly the mother of invention. Using a cigar box to create a guitar, fiddle or a banjo was an obvious choice for a few crafty souls.
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The cigar boxes were an easy way to make a soundbox guitar out of a diddley-bo for the average aspiring musician for whom manufactured instruments were still a long way off and the custom handcrafted guitar of the day was very much out of their price range
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The earliest proof of a cigar box instrument found so far is an etching of two Civil War Soldiers at a campsite with one playing a cigar box fiddle. The etching was created by French artist Edwin Forbes who worked as an official artist for the Union Army. The etching was included in Forbes work LIFE STORIES OF THE GREAT ARMY, copyrighted in 1876. There, the cigar box fiddle appears to sport an advanced viola-length neck attached to a ‘Figaro’ cigar box.
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In fact, during slavery, slaves were usually only allowed to posses a diddley-bo or a facsimilie thereof for musical entertainment (drums, for example, would have been a dangerous, far-reaching signaling/communication device). Once slavery was over (almost 30 years after the emergence of the still wildly popular cigar boxes) the sharecropper who could not afford anything resembling a guitar, had these empty boxes to put on the end of a diddly-bo, to resonate its sound in an increasingly loud and encroaching world.

This was an especially familial connection as the banjo which is derived from its african cousins, is especially related in tone and play to the cigarbox guitar.
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In addition to the etching, plans for a cigar box banjo were published by Daniel Carter Beard, founder of the Boy Scouts of America, in St. Nicholas Magazine, potentially in the 1870s. The plans, entitled ‘How to Build an Uncle Enos Banjo’ showed a step-by-step description for a playable 5-string fretless banjo made from a cigar box. Searching through an archive of the St. Nicholas magazine does not immediately reveal that Daniel C. Beard wrote an article with this same title, however, nor that he published the plans at all in that magazine. It is more likely that the plans for the Uncle Enos Banjo were first printed in the American Boy’s Handy Book in 1882 as supplementary material in the rear of the book as suggested in its prologue. (Beard, Daniel Carter (1882). The American Boy's Handy Book. New York: Scribner. ISBN 0879234490. )

It would seem that the earliest cigar box instruments would be extremely crude and primitive, however this is not always the case. The National Cigar Box Guitar Museum has acquired two cigar box fiddles built in 1886 and 1889 that seem very playable and well built. The 1886 fiddle was made for an 8 year old boy and is certainly playable, but the 1889 fiddle has a well carved neck and slotted violin headstock. The latter instrument was made for serious playing.

The Great Depression of the 1930s saw a resurgence of homemade musical instruments. Times were hard in the American south and for entertainment sitting on the front porch singing away their blues was a popular pastime. Musical instruments were beyond the means of everybody, but an old cigar box, a piece of broom handle and a couple wires from the screen door and a guitar was born.

Modern revival is sometimes due to interest in jugband and the DIY culture, as cigar box is relatively inexpensive when considering other factors, such as strings and construction time. Many modern cigar box guitar can thus be seen as a type of practice in lutherie, and implement numerous own touches, such as additional of pick up and resonator cones into it.

Another factor in the current revival can be attributed to many musicians desire for a more primal sound. Blues guitarists, in particular, have picked up the cigar box guitar in an attempt to play Delta Blues in its purest form.
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I made my first cigarbox guitar 24 years ago at the age of ten. After K___ when Fortier HS threw out its gym floor boards that got water (T&G red oak) I collected most of them thanks to John Orgon and decided that every last one of them should make sound again, with respect for the material and its home, if that could not be via basketballs and sneakers, it could only be in an instrument.

They are electrified by means of a piezo pickup and are not fretted, but played with a slide, as they are meant to be a transition between the banjo sound and the lap steel or dobro sound.

Since the frets are only lightly marked, the instrument is unlike a mass-produced, manufactured instrument in that the user excells in speed and dexterity by becoming intimate with the knowledge of the individual wood grain of their particular instrument. These guitars have the steel twang of banjo strings but no resonator cone, and are operated with a slide like a dobro.
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Notable performers:

Luther Dickinson
Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top
Richard Johnston
Tom Waits
Ed King of Lynyrd Skynyrd
Harry Manx
Chris Ballew
Joe Buck of Hank Williams III's Assjack
Robert Hamilton of the Low-Country Messiahs
PJ Harvey
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(I will add to this list as i find all the others, and there are very very many....)