Cigar box guitar by Kirk WIthrow
Kirk Withrow is a head and neck surgeon at UAB. He is a husband and father and an avid rock climber. He is also, passionately, a cigar-box guitarist and prolific “garage luthier,” a creator and player of unlikely hand-crafted instruments. He has just finished his latest collection of songs, home-recorded on homemade guitars: a kids’ album of animal songs, called Cows and Crocs and Dirty Socks.
Withrow has a lot going on. It’s not easy, he admits, balancing his creative life with family and career. “You have to cut things out—like sleeping and eating, and exercise.”
Weighty sacrifices, perhaps, but cigar box guitar enthusiasts are fueled by an uncommon drive and intensity of purpose. The instrument comes to embody, for them, a whole philosophy of art, self-expression, and living. It becomes an obsession. It gets inside you, and changes you.
“The type of people,” Withrow says, “that would make and pursue the cigar box guitar, they’re always a little bit different.”
Every cigar box guitarist seems to have his conversion story: on this day, the story goes, and in that moment, everything changed, and everything ever since has been different.
Withrow’s moment occurred four years ago. A patient—Phil Draper, a cabinet-maker from Decatur—gave him his first cigar box guitar. Draper had spent a few days in the hospital and Withrow had gotten to know him during his stay; Draper had told him about the guitars and Withrow was intrigued. He began researching the instruments online, where he discovered an entire community. When Draper gave him a guitar of his own, he fell in love.
Ironically, Withrow remembers, he had been determined to get out of his shift at the hospital the night Phil Draper came in—he was supposed to help a friend move that afternoon, and afterwards, he hoped to relax with a couple of beers. No one, though, would switch shifts with him; he reported to work, and his fate was sealed.
“It’s interesting to think what would have happened if he had not come in,” Withrow says, “or if I had gotten out of my shift.” As it happened, though, the chance encounter left a huge impact on Withrow’s life, an impact which has been much more than merely musical.
“It’s made a huge difference. It changed the way that I act, the way that I think, and a lot of the people I’ve met. Without it,” he speculates, “I guess I’d have to watch football or something—and I don’t want that to happen.”
That first guitar set off a chain reaction that is still going. Once he’d played a cigar box guitar, Withrow discovered he had to make one; then another one and another, each time searching for a new design and a new sound. With a couple of climbing friends he started a band, Buckeye, and recorded an album, Box Fetish: a collection of “very-much amateur recordings,” he says, a lot of old blues and banjo tunes and some originals, played dirty, raw, and loud. His next two CDs, Hogtie the Devil and Yesterday Will Be Better, both self-produced solo efforts, featured for the most part a repertoire of traditional old-time songs. Another project, Monks of the New Order, was an experiment in avant-garde noise. Then there’s the kids’ stuff: two years ago, after the birth of his son Silas, Withrow recorded Lullaby, a collection of instrumental tunes performed on original instruments and crib toys. “I imagined it,” he says, describing his concept for the album, “as the last day in the womb and the first day out of it,” a sonic chronicle of a child’s emergence into the world. Cows and Crocs and Dirty Socks is Withrow’s latest effort.
It’s hard for Withrow—or for anyone who visits his workshop and music room—to believe that it has been only four years since his cigar box conversion. He estimates that in those four years he has given away or sold about fifty handmade instruments. He has several on display and for sale locally at Naked Art, and he also sells them online, through websites like eBay and Etsy. The online sales, he says, go primarily overseas: he’s had customers in Spain, Italy, Israel, and elsewhere.
To make a simple, fretless, unamplified guitar, no inlay or frills, takes Withrow only about an hour. A more involved design will take ten or twenty. Fully functional instruments, the guitars double as works of art: carefully constructed out of found objects, each has its own aesthetic and personality. There is, also, the obvious novelty factor. “People will stop and look at it,” Withrow says. “People are surprised you can get that much sound out of it.”
That is, after all, the goal: to extract sound from the smallest, most ordinary, and least likely of sources; to create something useful and new out of something useless and old; to find and experiment with the music that is embedded in just about anything.
Before his moment of conversion, Withrow had struggled to find a musical voice or vehicle for his pent-up creative energies. On the guitar (the store-bought, non-cigar-box kind), he sounded, he says, like every other guitar player. He took up the banjo, but felt that he had quickly reached his own limits in exploring what that instrument had to offer him: “Banjo,” he explains, “is a versatile instrument, but I could never get it to sound like anything but a banjo.” He wanted to take it someplace else, to “stretch beyond the normal range” of that instrument’s voice, but he found himself stuck and uninspired.
Withrow describes his music, in those, pre-cigar-box days, as stale. “It had gotten mundane, and I hadn’t been doing much—certainly not anything creative.”
The cigar box changed everything, opening up a well of creativity—not only as a musician, but as a woodworker and artist—which he had never before experienced. Once Withrow made his first guitar, he found himself hungry to make a second, then a third; each creation, he discovered, was distinct. “The next one will have a different sound,” he says, working on one. “I’ll make a guitar, then I’ll make one electric. Maybe I’ll make a volume and a tone control. Then I start working with battery-operated, self-contained amplifiers.” In the process of making guitar after guitar, he discovers ever-increasing possibilities to pursue the next time: an idea for an inlay design, for a handwound pick-up or for a resonator. The guitars multiply, fast.
“I’d never done any kind of woodworking,” Withrow confesses, but with the first efforts to make a guitar came a simple, empowering epiphany: “You just realize that you can do it.” Withrow’s guitar-making quickly led to other projects: paintings made from spray paint, scrap wood and Sharpies; charcoal-and-marker sketches; pendants and jewelry; wood-carvings and wall-hangings. After making so many guitars, he found that he had quality wood he didn’t want to throw away, and from those leftover materials he began making boxes, which he has also started selling.
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The practice of making stringed instruments from cigar boxes—often with screen-wire strings strung down a broom-handle neck—is about a century and a half old. In recent years, a scattered community of musicians has developed from the cigar box tradition a culture of its own: what some practitioners go so far as to call a “revolution.”
“The biggest force behind that,” says Withrow, “is Shane Speal” of York, Pennsylvania. The self-proclaimed “King of the Cigar Box Guitar,” Speal started, in 2003, a Yahoo forum for “CBG” enthusiasts, attracting a membership of over 3,000. Speal is the producer of Uncle Enos, an irregularly published homemade magazine which bills itself as “the lo-fi voice of the Prim Rock Underground.” In its pages, he and other writers articulate a kind of running manifesto for their homemade music—and, more broadly, for the DIY (do-it-yourself) approach. “If you’re a musician,” Speal writes in one issue, “I encourage you to build a cigar box guitar or one of the other instruments highlighted in this issue. If you are in other arts, try something just as primal. Take toy camera photographs. Create comic strips using only rubber stamps…. Sing thru tin cans and wire. Drum on plastic buckets. Research and write the history of some forgotten hero in your hometown. Write, create, and produce your own zine.
“Because let’s face it, the world needs more deep art and new heroes.”
For the modern-day cigar box guitarist, the search for what Speal calls the “primal” is an attempt to strip music and art to their barest bones and most basic: to create something from scratch, and to do it yourself. “We want to play something true again,” Speal writes in another issue. “Something deep.”
There is often in the voice of cigar box players and makers a kind of missionary zeal, a cigar box mysticism and cigar box evangelism manifested in the telling of conversion stories and in the sharing of the cigar box gospel. The instruments are not simply means to creating music; for the true believers, the instruments are an entry point into a lifestyle and perspective that transcends the music to become something larger.
Community is a critical part of this culture. Spurred largely by the efforts of Speal, a network of like souls has developed, linking musicians and sparking friendships across the US and around the world. With several enthusiasts across the state, Alabama has become one focal point in that community. In 2005, Huntsville tattoo artist Matt Crunk launched the Alabama Cigar Box Extravaganza, an annual event featuring workshops, a guitar-building contest, and a line-up of performers from around the country. In 2008, the University of Alabama’s Max Shores spotlighted the festival and its community in a documentary film titled Songs Inside the Box. The film features performances by and interviews with a number of musicians, including Speal and Withrow. “They’re an odd bunch of characters,” Withrow says in the film, describing his fellow musicians, “but they’re about the nicest people that you’ll run across.”
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Some instruments are born with something to say built-in already inside them: they come to life with a voice and a message beyond the control of their maker or player. In these instruments, indeed, the roles are reversed and the instrument plays its player; the musician becomes the means through which the wood and strings make their own inevitable statement heard. There are old stories and eerie ballads of fiddles and harps and guitars that possess their players, instruments that sing their own insistent songs as soon as they are touched—a fiddle, for example, that will only play “The Wind and the Rain,” or a flute that blows the story of a poor girl’s murder.
Kirk Withrow speaks of the songs that exist inside specific instruments, songs which belong to a particular guitar, that seem to emerge full-voiced from the new creation. “You make instruments for songs,” he says—“or, certain songs come with an instrument. The way you tune it up, a song pops out of it that you haven’t been able to play before.” In Withrow’s experience, a new instrument will liberate a particular song which no other instrument can get quite right. The discoveries of new songs within new constructions keeps him always working on the next instrument and toward the next sound. In this music, a dynamic, collaborative relationship links the maker/musician, the instrument, and the song.
In its origins, the cigar box guitar was chiefly the domain of the poorest segments of society—of resourceful musicians creating music on the cheap, from homemade and found objects—or it was an invention for children, a household experiment from which curious kids could coax their first musical sounds. The cigar box guitar (or fiddle, or banjo, or mandolin), historically, has been a kind of stepping-stone instrument, a player’s first entry into making music, abandoned sooner or later for a “real” guitar or banjo: for an axe, that is, of the store-bought variety.
Today’s cigar box guitar movement reverses the pattern. Here the cigar box instrument—the music it unleashes and the statement in makes—is the ultimate end. Its players are mostly middle-class and middle-aged (in his early thirties, Kirk Withrow is younger than many of his musical peers), and many of them have set aside fancier, far-pricier electric guitars—with all their bell-and-whistle, store-bought accessories—in order to go cigar box. Withrow and other devotees speak of their “liberation” from the dominant guitar-store culture, wherein pickers ogle each other’s high-tech gadgetry and mechanically swap note-perfect Stevie Ray Vaughan licks.
The cigar box guitar represents for players like Withrow the final step (whether forward or backward or somehow simultaneously both) in an instrumental evolution and musical-spiritual quest. Encouraged by a spirit of group camaraderie, that quest is nonetheless fundamentally individual. Withrow points out that many cigar box guitarists perform as one-man bands. He mentions a few—John Lowe (aka Johnny Lowebow), Richard Johnston, Ben Prestage—adding that people hear them and are amazed that “you can get all that sound out of one person.” The one-man band, after all, is the logical extension of that do-it-yourself spirit that fuels the cigar box guitarist in the first place: there is the same desire to singlehandedly create something from scratch, and to unpack as much sound as is possible from so seemingly small a source. On his homemade CDs, Withrow himself does it all: he writes or arranges the songs, builds and plays the instruments, and records the tracks, all in his own home.
The word Withrow uses again and again is “freedom.” He describes his own, uninspiring trips to the guitar stores: “You see guys sitting around and showing off the same barre chords they learned from some tablature book. Then you realize it doesn’t have to be like that. It’s a liberation from that.
“It knocks down so many barriers when you realize you don’t have to go and buy a guitar. It’s not that you can’t afford it, you just don’t want to go and buy a guitar.” Then, he says, there is the pride that comes from doing it yourself: “the pride that you make a guitar, and you play a guitar, and you make the recording.
“From the very beginning, you do all of it.”