MUSICAL CIGAR BOXES
A personal memory
by Tony Hyman
My 1960’s were spent living in Hawaii, California, Colorado, California, Chicago and New York City in that order. During that entire decade I was almost always in class or teaching one (jhi, hs, jr college, college, adult, and Peace Corps) a journey that went from Navy Petty Officer to Columbia University doctoral candidate.
The middle of that decade found me also hosting a weekly radio show, American Folk something or other, on KSJS, the San Jose State College radio station. The show, and previous experience as a Colorado State (Ft. Collins) folk music concert promoter, gave me the opportunity to meet and interview guitarists, black and white, who reminisced about their first instrument, inevitably made from a cigar box by some loving family member.
These were inspirational tales to a veteran cigar box collector. As a kid, I’d heard of “cigar box violins” but took them as toys and infrequent occurrences, as much myth as reality. It was very different when someone like Josh White referred to them. In the mid 60’s I began looking for one.
Antiquing through central Pennsylvania on a mid 70’s Sunday, spouse Marilee and I stopped to map-read and stretch in front of a closed antique shop. A peek through the padlocked shop’s front door revealed a large
barrel about 25 feet away. Perched on top, a cigar box instrument, my first ever. A phone call resulted in the proprietor’s opening, my strolling through the store for about ten minutes, and finally casually holding the violin aloft and asking
“What’s this?”
“A child’s toy made from a cigar box,” he said.
“What do you want for it,” I asked.
“Oh...gimme a buck.”
Marilee swears my feet never touched the ground on my way to the car.
In the following thirty years years I located a few dozen guitars, violins, ukes and banjos, as well as a few less familiar creations. They had been made as toys, stage props, department store window decoration and as serious musical instruments, some made by very fine luthiers. I learned that instructions for making cigar box instruments appeared in men’s, women’s and boy’s magazines as early as the 1870’s. (the one illustrated is from Science and Mechanics, 1948) Popular in all generations from the Civil War to Vietnam, cigar box instruments are undergoing a revival of interest today. Bands made up wholly or in part by cigar box instruments now play gigs, record CD’s and highlight festivals. Instruments of all ages sell on eBay.
Recent interest in cigar box music led me to deaccession more than half my collection, giving others the opportunity to play and enjoy them.
I kept only enough to fill an 8 foot wall in my ephemera library. Thanks are due to friends, dealers and strangers who helped find these and other instruments for me, especially US flag collector Mark Sutton, who found 4 of the ones displayed on the wall. That number has since been reduced to only my six favorites.
top to bottom: [9783] [9792] [9782]