Cigar Box Banjo Jam

“When a child is born he or she should be issued a new dog and a cigar box banjo.” That little misquote is from Peanuts Guide to Life, by Charles Schultz. He didn’t say which type of dog and he didn’t recommend a cigar box banjo, just a banjo. The principle holds though for starting a child off right, and the questions about which type of dog and which type of banjo still need to be answered. The dog type is, of course, a beagle. The banjo type requires more consideration.

Banjos are made from a host of materials, metal and wood primarily, with some plastics and combinations using each. There are also banjos made from other instruments like ukuleles, guitars or mandolins. It seems there are more banjo types than dog types. One banjo uses a bass in a standup version that is definitely far more than just a drumhead with strings, often the very definition of banjo. String quantities are another wide variable, with one, three, four, five, six or ten. Many of these combinations use open backs, others use closed backs, some with pickups for amplification, others without pickups. The combinations available can boggle your mind.

When considering all the possibilities, don’t forget the cigar box banjo. Many well known, very gifted players got their start playing on a cigar box. Made from scratch using discarded components, they were simpler to build and became the spark that ignited many players’ life experience. Today cigar box banjos are still made from scratch or from a building kit that has all one needs. Add to that the builders own creative imagination and the result is a high quality, well playing instrument that equals the effort and commitment to excellence that is partnered with that imagination.

In the beginner’s experience, the banjo sound can move from painful and piercing to plunky hollow and incisive. A tuned banjo with a pleasant sound heard in one player’s ear can be heard as an annoyance by another. Mark Twain once remarked that the sound produced coupled with the unmatched experience of playing one made the banjo an instrument that could not be imitated. Perhaps thinking of that pleasant to one, irritating to another banjo sound, Twain also famously said that a gentleman is a person who knows how to play a banjo but doesn’t. As most gentleman players have experienced, the sound of a cigar box banjo is deeper and mellower, and, unamplified, is not as loud. “Good sounding banjo” becomes a subjective term dependent more on the music being played than on the instrument itself.

Many well known banjo players and many well known people who are not so well known for their banjo playing got their first exposure to making music with a cigar box instrument. Freddie Hart, whose 1971 country hit “Easy Lovin’” peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard chart, grew up in Loachapoka, Alabama in a large, sharecropping family of fifteen children. He got started musically by cobbling out a cigar box instrument using strings made of wire from the copper coil of a Model T Ford.

Other artists used the very rudiments of instrument making as the root of their iconic musical style, creating what would shunned by many today as less than basic musical instruments. Stringbean Akerman made his first banjo from a shoebox and stings made using thread from his mother’s sewing kit. Jim Reeves, the youngest of nine children, made his first instrument from a cigar box and rubber bands.

Carl Sandburg, “the American Bard”, tried his hand at a willow whistle, than a comb with paper over it, a tin fife, a flageolet (a type of wooden flute), and an ocarina. Another example of one far more famous as a writer than a banjo player, nevertheless played his own brand of music, especially early in his life. His first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where he cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires himself. He claimed to play none of these instruments well, but each of them, and in his view, especially the cigar box banjo, helped define who he really was.

Whether famous as recording artists or famous as something else, what ties all these folks together is their unquestioned gift of originality. If even the minutest part of that originality was sparked by their early-in-life experiences playing a simple cigar box banjo and if you can in the minutest way identify with that experience, then my work here is done. Now let’s go see if we can find a beagle.

Additional information is available about cigar box banjos and how you can build one here, or you can email me and I’ll send you a reply with some pictures walker@papasboxes.com