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It is no accident that at the same time African

Americans were creating the lyrical and musical roots

for the blues, they were also creating their own ad hoc

musical instruments. The earliest extant examples of cigar

box guitars, for example, stem from this period (although

reported history dates them to just before the Civil War).

By the 1880s, plans to build simple cigar box banjoes

were appearing in print. While there were, of course, white

children who also built their own homemade instruments,

the particular poverty of the southern Black made such

creations more of a necessity than a social curiosity. If you

were a young southern Black growing up on a plantation,

and you wanted to learn to play guitar, it was almost a

given that you’d have to make one yourself. And this is

precisely what Robert Johnson, and so many before and

after him, did.

Johnson’s childhood friends recall how he took three

strings of baling wire and nailed them to the side of the

sharecropping shack he shared with his mother, Julia,

and stepfather, Dusty Willis, in Commerce, Mississippi.

Johnson slid two bottles under the wires to increase the

tension, and then picked out tunes on his homemade

diddley bow. And while those same friends said they

couldn’t make any sense out of what he was playing, no

doubt to the young Robert it was pure music. It wasn’t

long after that that Robert got his first guitar, but the roots

of his music had been laid on the homemade diddley bow.

The great slide-guitar evangelist Blind Willie Johnson

began on a one-string cigar box guitar. Big Bill Broonzy,

Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and so many others did likewise.

It’s not stretching the point too far to wonder whether the

blues would have developed as they did had it not been for

these homemade instruments. Mike Orr does a wonderful

job of relating this tradition to a new generation of America,

updating some plans to include electric pickups, while still

remaining true to the underlying impulses that gave birth

to the instruments and the music played on them. This

book deftly takes us through the creation of these

instruments so we can find our own connection with these

musical roots.

If the blues tell stories about life experiences revolving

around race, love, and social class, then these instruments

provide the background upon which those stories

were sung.

Robert Johnson’s musical acumen came as a result

of creating his own instrument to simulate the sound

of a guitar. It was that zeal to find solace in music that

comforted his soul as he lived a very transient lifestyle in

rural Mississippi. It is that same zeal that can be shared

through this book.

From L to R

Standing:

Steven Johnson, grandson

of Robert Johnson & VP;

Michael Johnson, grandson

of Robert Johnson &

Treasurer. Seated: Ben

L. Minnifield, VP Global

Marketing & Media; Dr.

Tanya Scott, VP Global

Business Development;

Claud Johnson, son of

Robert Johnson & founder;

Vasti Jackson, Artist &

Musical Director. Painting

by artist Earl Klatzel.

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