'A Merchant Set Apart by Time & Tradition'

Royal Mile Cigar Box Guitars

The History of the Cigar Box Guitar

 

Developed out of the southern American delta around the 1870’s after the Civil War, the Cigar Box Guitar was born out of necessity.  America was in financial ruin and money was tight.  People were driven to make an instrument out of what they had lying around – cigar boxes, broom handles and baling wire. 

 

In addition, the enslaved Africans, brought over to America prior to the 1800’s, had also brought their culture with them, including the stringed instrument called a ‘banjar’ (the origins of the modern banjo).

They began to build their own cigar box instruments too, and expressed their difficult lives through the development of the blues.  These instruments weren’t fretted and so they began to use bottles and rum necks to slide across the strings – this impacted on the evolution of the bottleneck-style of playing the blues as played by the likes of Son House and Muddy Waters.

 

These cigar box guitars remained popular amongst the poor and became widespread again during the Great Depression, as poor sharecroppers and impoverished workers couldn’t afford to go to a shop and buy a guitar.

 

Many of the great blues players started out on a homebuilt CBG – Lightin’ Hopkins, B.B King, Carl Perkins, Blind Willie Johnson and Jimi Hendrix amongst them.

The rich history and romance of these instruments has lead to a modern interest in making and playing them.

 

The Cigar Box Guitars I have made for Robert Graham's Royal Mile Cigar store are all ‘resonators’.  These are based (loosely) on the old ‘Dobro’ and ‘National’ guitars which used a spun

aluminium cone inside the guitar to act as a rudimentary speaker.  In the recycling tradition of the Cigar Box Guitar, I have been using tin cans to act in the same way and resonate the sound of the box to make it louder.        

 

The Cohiba ‘Tuna Can’ Resonator

 

This model uses a tuna can as its resonator cone (it’s washed well, so you won’t be attracting the neighbourhood cats).  It’s got an oak and mahogany neck, all hand shaped and carved from scratch with a fretted oak fingerboard.  The piezo pick up means you can plug it in and play, while the hand-built mahogany body - made to expand the cigar box – means it can be played acoustically as well. 

 

The 3-string ‘Holey Romeo’ Resonator

 

This little 3-stringer is perhaps closest in form to a traditional CBG.  It is played best using a slide, although you can use the frets to finger it.  The neck is all hand carved out of oak and mahogany.  There is a drawer handle holding the strings in place, which is in the tradition of using found and recycled objects to act as parts of the guitar.  The bridge is also made out of the cigar holders which were stuck inside the box. 

 

The Corona 4-string ‘Chair Leg’ Resonator

 

So named after it was mentioned to me that the support strut running down the back of the box looks like a chair leg, this guitar seems best played traditionally fingering it rather than using the slide.  It uses an aluminium tin lid as its resonator and has a woody hollow sound.  It has a fender-style jack input which is attached to a piezo pick-up. 

 

The Oliva ‘Fray Bentos’ Resonator

 

I hope this guitar looks tastier than the pie I had to eat to get the Fray Bento’s tin can to use as a resonator.  I suffered for my art!

 

This guitar has a sheet of steel across its soundboard, giving it some weight and a unique sound.  Played best using a slide, you can plug it in too.  There is a fair bit of recycling on this guitar:  the soundboard is made from two corner shelving units, the jack socket came from my old washing machine, the sound hole is a pewter tea strainer and I found the metal eyelets behind my fridge when I moved in to the house.  It’s a green guitar with a small carbon footprint!  

 

About Me

 

After first seeing a cigar box banjo on Pat Costello’s youtube banjo workshops, I thought the look and sound of these odd little instruments was unique and decided I wanted one.  I set about in the garage with the crude hand tools I had (the only power tool I have even now is a drill) and made a guitar which looked OK and sounded rubbish.  As soon as it was finished, I was already thinking of how to make the next one sound and look better.  I found a website dedicated to the building of CBG’s (www.cigarboxnation.com) and became part of the enthusiastic, helpful and slightly odd community of eccentrics and oddballs who seem drawn to these instruments.

 

I grew up playing upright bass, piano, guitar and banjo, but nothing has quite captured my imagination like a hand built cigar box guitar – each one seems to have a unique character and story to tell.

 

I hope you enjoy these guitars as much as I did making them.  

 

Anthony Fowder  

Robert Graham Ltd Est 1874
10-14 West Nile Street, Glasgow ,G1 2PP Phone: +44 (0)141 248 7283
194a Rose Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4AZ - Phone: +44 (0) 131 226 1874
254 Canongate, Edinburgh, EH8 8AA Phone: +44(0) 131 556 2791