40 winter 2012 | the best of lake oconee

magicmusic

boxStories of musicians fiddling around with homemade instrumentsby katie walker

lake oconee living 41

Let’s talk about Hasil Adkins for a minute. Hasil was born sometime during the Great Depression in West Virginia. He didn’t have much, but he had music — even if he had to make his own. He heard Hank Williams on the radio and wondered, how did that man make all that sound at once? Playing all those instruments while singing, too. Hasil wanted to do the same. He’d whale on a milk can so long and loud his father made him take it outside.

Hasil was fascinated by his neighbor’s guitar. The yowls of the instrument were like a new language to him. He watched the man play and play, until one day — the adults had been drinking and were in high spirits — they let him touch it.

Hasil began to make his own guitars from the castaways of farm life. Old water buckets now carried sound. He strung his guitars with barbed wire. On the farm, nothing goes to waste. When you talk about homemade instruments, you are naturally talking about a history of necessity. Of music lovers finding music in what they have, and making it any way possible.

Or, in Hasil’s case, making music every way possible. Until his death in 2005, he continued to make music as a one-man band – strumming the guitar, his feet simultaneously working the high-hat cymbal and pedal bass drum. His maniacal sound earned him a spot in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. His recordings are not for the faint-hearted. Wild rocka-billy music like Hasil’s horrified conser-vative tastes in the 1950s. He wrote songs about sex, chickens, and beheadings. It is the music of someone who learned to play guitar on barbed wire. Wild, home-grown music. Music that grew with what it had, like a weed climbing up bailing wire. Music that grew from a bucket.

May Newman plays a cigar box banjo that she made in Palatka, Fla., in the 1920s. photo courtesy of mary anne mcdonald and the florida folklife col-lection, state library and archives of florida. Inset: Hasil Adkins at his com-pound of trailers in West Virginia in 1993. photo by beth herzhaft.

1929 Mickey Mouse tickles the ivories and Claws the Cat jams on a cigar box fiddle in “Mickey’s Follies.”

My father, Davy Davis, came to music very differently than Hasil Adkins. When he was four, he followed his big brother to a friend’s house. They were playing The Beatles’ “I Should Have Known Better.” My dad was mesmerized by the tune and the yellow and orange swirl of the 45 spinning on the player. Like the guitarist who witnessed to Hasil, The Beatles enraptured my father.

In the mid-70s, when my dad’s high school friends decided to form a band, they declared him drummer, though he had never before played set. My grand-daddy bought him an inexpensive snare. On the drum head, my dad painted the “Big Blue Meenie” – the villain of The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” cartoon. Like my granddaddy, my dad loves to doodle, and this convergence of art and music was not to be the last. In 1988, he opened his own music store and began

repairing instruments. He wondered what to do with all the spare parts he had accumulated. If necessity is the mother of invention, then ennui is the father of harebrained ideas.

“I had a cigar box fiddle on the wall that somebody traded me. I guess that in-fluenced me,” he said. “I started making funny stuff.” One his earliest creations was the “Didgeridon’t,” a violin of sorts, made with PVC pipe painted green, with a Guinness can bridge. The didgeridon’t is played with a bow and “makes terrible sounds like cats in a dryer.”

“I figured the Australians have the didgeridoo, the Irish would want the didgeridon’t,” he said. For nearly two de-cades, my dad has taken cast iron frying pans, Christmas cookie tins, Spam cans, baseball bats, cigar boxes, other detritus of modern life – and, like a mad scientist, turned junk into music.

1864 the Federal revenue act requires that cigars be packed in boxes before being shipped by the factory. Durable packaging was necessary to protect goods being shipped long distances on rough, unpaved roads.

1860-1880s the banjo gains social acceptance among young, affluent women in america. Prior to this time, the banjo had been viewed as an african instrument, and was not held in high regard by many wealthy whites.

1914 like Forbes’ Union soldiers, allied soldiers destress with homemade cigar box instru-ments, called “trench fiddles.”

42 winter 2012 | the best of lake oconee

1919 a violin short-age in France leads Pri-vate Jack tender to cre-ate his own out of (you guessed it) a cigar box. He and his “panatella fiddle” were drafted into a soldier show that toured France.

1937 Carl Perkins’ father builds a guitar for his son from a ci-gar box, broomstick, and bailing wire. Per-kins falls in love with the guitar and goes on to become a legend of rockabilly music.

a brief history of Cigar box music

Cigar box instruments have a long and inter-esting history, begin-ning, naturally, when cigars where shipped in wooden boxes. Two centuries ago, commod-ities were much more precious than they are in our industrialized age. Even paper was of great value, and resourceful Americans found ways to reinvent and reuse everyday objects.

1876 edwin Forbes publishes life Studies of the Great army, a collection his illustrated scenes from the Civil war. Forbes was hired to document the war for Frank leslie’s illustrated Newspaper. His sketch, “Home Sweet Home,” shows two Union soldiers at camp, one playing a cigar box violin.

1890 Daniel Carter beard, a founder of the boy Scouts of america, publishes “the american boy’s Handy book.” beard is the earliest known publisher of instructions for building a cigar box banjo. the Uncle enos banjo is made by a former slave, Uncle enos, who lives in a cabin and shows three young boys how to make their own banjo.

1891 a former slave, the rev. Daniel Jenkins establishes an orphanage for young african american chil-dren. the Jenkins Or-phanage band played homemade instru-ments at the inaugural parades of Presidents theodore roosevelt and wiliiam taft.

Early 1900’sPerformers on the Vaudeville circuit amuse audiences with a variety of acts, including one-act plays, song and dance numbers, and (unfortunately) portrayals of racial or ethnic stereotypes. Cigar box instruments become a staple of Vaude-ville. the instruments were used for comedic effect, or to astonish audiences with beautiful sounds emanating from such a humble source.

1951-1953 Schroeder is vexed by Charlie Brown’s accompaniment on a cigar box guitar in Charles Schultz’ Peanuts comic strip.

1960s luthiers at the kamaka Ukelele plant and Martin Guitar plant use cigar boxes to create prototypes of instrument designs. the sound pro-duced by the prototypes is nearly identical to the regular instruments.

1968 Hector Garcia, a Cuban classical guitarist, is captured in the bay of Pigs invasion. Garcia passes the time in Fidel Castro’s dungeon prison composing songs on a cigar box guitar he made from wire and tin scraps. after his release, Garcia performs with his prison-made guitar on the ed Sullivan show.

1998 by now, cigar box instru-ments have been marginalized by lack of necessity. Professionally-crafted instruments have become accessible even to poor musicians. in an era where nearly everything is disposable, consumers are less likely to repurpose materials,.

“I went to the Dr. Suess school of luthiery,” he quips. Despite the modest materials, each instrument has a rich twang all its own. He carefully sculpts the nuts, bridges and critical parts of each guitar for the best pitch. “I don’t have the patience to be a real luthier, making instruments out of birdseye maple. That’s why I like the homemade instruments. They don’t look like they make a lot of sound but they do. It’s like looking at an old crazy airplane you don’t think will make it off the ground, but it does.”

Wabi-sabi is the Japanese philosophy of finding beauty in humble materials. It is an appreciation of things for their utility and patina. My dad heralds the humble Spam can for its fantastic resonance and crisp, clear sound. He can look at a crutch and see an upright bass. An old rifle becomes a custom lap steel guitar for an Army sniper – pull the trigger and

a bullet-shaped slide pops out of a secret compartment. He stuffs vintage suitcases full of sound, as speaker cabinets and amplifiers.

He marks locations on the fretboard with most anything – Civil War-era miniballs for a historian’s guitar; cat’s eye marbles for a guitar made in memory of Frisky Pickles, a lady’s dearly deceased cat; LED lights for the fretboard runway of a tiny F-22 Raptor jet guitar. My dad delights in making these musical biogra-phies for other people.

“Just like everybody’s voice is a little different, [homemade instruments] have their own voice,” he said. “Making music is like anything else – like laughing – anything else humans do to deal with life. Music helps you through good times and bad.”

the information in this timeline and more is available in william J. Jehle’s fascinating and

comprehensive book, A History of the Cigar Box

Guitar, available on amazon.com

44 winter 2012 | the best of lake oconee

For Hasil Adkins, making music (which first meant making a guitar) kept him from working in the coal mines of West Virginia. “The Haze” worked as a radio repairman and did odd jobs to sup-port himself while recording thousands of songs in his childhood home. He got his own “real” guitar and recorded sev-eral 45’s – and sent a copy of each one to the White House. Hasil was certainly not the first resourceful musician to make an instrument out of old parts. In fact, in pre-industrial America, homemade instru-ments – cigar box guitars in particular – were fairly common.

While Appalachian bluegrass is famous for the twang of banjos, the instru-ment originated in Africa and was brought to America by slaves. Slave instruments were humble in construction, but were very meaningful to their owners. In “Blues: The Basics,” Dick Weissman enumerates a few of these creations: the ban-jo, bones, mouth-bow, quills, tambourine, and the single-stringed diddley bow. There are many accounts of slaves es-caping their masters with little more than their instruments. A runaway slave might carry his banjo on his back, but it may have been music carrying him through times of great anguish.

During the Civil War, soldiers would while away the hours between skirmishes and drills by making and playing instru-ments. Edwin Forbes, an illustrator hired to docu-ment the war for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, observed the lives of Union soldiers in the field.

“Most of the soldiers’ feelings found expression in music. Its influence both saddened and brightened their lives as they went from ‘grave to gay.’ Their life seemed to make them simple-hearted,

and merriment gave a zest to existence while the shedding of pent-up tears many times alleviated sorrow,” wrote Forbes in “Thirty Years After: An Art-ist’s Story of the Great War.” One of

Forbes’ sketches, “Home Sweet Home” shows a Union soldier

playing a cigar box fiddle as another soldier listens in-tently. The soldier’s fiddle was made from a box of Figaro cigars and a whittled pine neck, with a pine bow strung with

reddish-brown horse hair.Forbes writes: “Notic-

ing the color, I said, ‘Where did you get this horse-hair?’

The fellow remarked sheepishly, ‘From your mare’s tail, when she was

tied near here. I took it because it was so long.’ I assured him that no harm

had been done and talked a bit with his companion, a drummer-boy… I had to admit the tones were wonderfully good for so rude a little instrument.”

Half a century later, during World War I, fiddle music could be heard emanating from the trenches in Allied camps. These

“trench fiddles” were made from cigar boxes, plane parts, cat gut, and wire, and were still played with a horse hair bow. In 1919, a violin shortage in France led Private Jack Tender to create his own out of a cigar box. A wire story in The St. Regis Falls Adirondack News reported that the “Y.M.C.A. at 120 had raked the country unsuccessfully for the fiddle that Private Tender wanted more than any-thing else in the world. But even a Y man can’t produce an instrument that doesn’t exist, and so this one had to go back to Private Tender and suggest a substitute – one more in the world of substitutes that France was in those days.” Following the war, Tender and his “panatella fiddle” were drafted into a soldier show that toured France.

Both of these brutal wars were fought in such close proximity to the enemy that bayonets were necessary. Men had to become savages to fight. In the still moments when the fighting ceased, whittling a fiddle out of pine must have been humanizing. Strumming a cigar box banjo in the chaos of war must have reminded these soldiers of where they came from. These men could make music for themselves when they needed it most.

This is why Daniel Carter Beard, an illustrator, outdoorsman, and a founder of the Boy Scouts of America, published instructions for the ‘Uncle Enos’ banjo in his “American Boy’s Handy Book” in 1890. Beard taught his Scouts how to be self-reliant. His life mission was to remind us of our pioneering roots, of how Americans functioned in the days before industrialized abundance. His instruc-tions include an anecdote about Uncle Enos, a former slave who teaches three young boys how to make a banjo from a cigar box, broomstick, and a piece of an old shoe. Necessity begets ingenuity. Uncle Enos, a man who had very little, had a cabin full of music.

When there were no fiddles to be found in all of France, in the miserable face of the Great War, Private Tender could still make music. Hasil Adkins made it by the bucketful during the Great Depression. My dad makes so much music, he cans it, preserving it for anyone who asks.

– Katie Walker is the art director of Lake Oconee Living.

Find recordings of

Hasil Adkins’ music on Norton records and Fat Possum

records. Go to our website, www.lakeoconeelivingmag.com, to hear

“Sally weedy waddy woody wally.”

See more of Cousin

Dave’s creations on Facebook, search for “Cousin Dave Davis.” He can make you your own special instrument if you bring him your mama’n’em’s favorite frying pan, or whatever. email him at

cousin_daves@yahoo.com.

Bill Jehle’s “One Man’s Trash: A History

of the Cigar box Guitar” is a fascinating, comprehensive

report of the history of stringed, homemade instruments. Jehle fol-

lows the instrument from its origins in an antebellum cigar factory to the young hands of budding 20th Century artists like Carl Perkins

and Jimi Hendrix. it is available on amazon.com.

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