The National Folk Festival is not just a place to sample food and listen to music. At the Festival Marketplace, visitors can explore the hand-made work of craftsmen and artists from across Maryland and Delmarva, including crab pots infused with sea glass, saddle bags, custom ironwork, screen door paintings from Baltimore row houses, and guitars made from old cigar boxes.
The hand-made instruments are the creations of Stan Opiel, proprietor of Mudboy Guitarworks in Chincoteague Island, Virginia. He first learned about cigar box guitars about twenty years ago, when he visited a music store in Memphis, Tennessee. When he returned home, he looked up the instructions for building them online. After a few failed attempts, he made his first playable instrument. Two decades later, he has built about seven hundred guitars and a few other stringed instruments like banjos and mandolins, and he has sold them to players and collectors as far away as England and France.
The instruments are works of folk art. Each has a unique look and sound. They come acoustic and electric, usually with three or four strings. The cigar boxes from which they are made also come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and materials. Some of them are more than one hundred years old.
The history of cigar box instruments goes back at least as far as the 1840’s. An engraving by illustrator Edwin Forbes in the 1870’s depicted a civil war soldier playing a cigar box violin and instructions for building a cigar box banjo were included in a short story by boy scouts founder Daniel Carter Beard in 1884.
Opiel says the cigar box guitar became very popular in the South, especially during the depression when people couldn’t afford to buy new instruments.
“Typically, the original ones were (made from a) soapbox or cigar box,” says Opiel. “They put a couple holes in the end, they … cut the handle off a broom, (and would) run it through there. They'd put a nail on each end, a piece of glass for your nut and a piece of glass for your sound like an old broken bottle… And typically, the strings were wire pulled out the screen door,” Opiel says.
Bluesman Lightning Hopkins described learning to play on just such an instrument.
A resurgence of interest in cigar box guitars came about in the early nineties and the list of contemporary performers who play cigar box instruments includes Billy Gibbons of Z.Z. Top, Tom Waits and Paul McCartney. If you are interested in learning more, check out this documentary or this book by William Jehle.
