Necessity is the mother of invention. This saying finds it's truth in the creation of the cigar box guitar. This style of guitar has been around for a hundred and fifty years, and just as the music it represents, it is truly an American art form.

Believe it or not, but there was a simpler time, when friends and families sat on the front porch to 'catch up' with each other. They would play music and sing songs together for their entertainment. If you couldn't afford an instrument, you made your own. That's right, with your own two hands and ingenuity, you made an instrument with the things you had laying around. The home was the original birth place of the cigar box guitar and other similar instruments that would latter shape and influence some of the best musicians of our modern time. Many great guitar players got their start on a home made cigar box guitar. Jimi Hendrix, Lightning Hopkins and even B.B. King, all got started on cigar box guitars.

The cigar box as we know it today didn't exist until the mid 1800's, before that cigars were shipped in larger boxes of 100 or more cigars. When smaller boxes of 20-50 cigars were introduced and cigar smoking gained in popularity, there were a lot of empty cigar boxes laying around just waiting for something to be made of them with a spark of creativity. These boxes would find a lot of different uses throughout the years, but none as practical, ingenious or inspirational as the cigar box guitar. The cigar box guitar was simple and at times crude in it's design, basically it was a box and a stick, throw some strings on it and start plucking away. Because these were made cheaply and with found materials, there were no rules to making them, it was whatever worked.

Another early instrument in the development of the blues was the 'diddley-bow', this was a one string instrument, usually made with old broom wire nailed to the house. You would place a couple small bottles under the wire for tension, strum the wire and use another bottle or piece of metal or anything you could find to slide up and down the wire to produce the notes. A more portable version of this with a fence board or other piece of wood was eventually made and with the use of the bottle to make the notes, came the evolution of the the bottleneck slide.  Break the neck off of a wine bottle, smooth out the rough edges on a rock or the sidewalk and put it to use. Since cigar box guitars did not usually have frets...this is where the slide came into the picture. Musicians would use the slide to 'fret' the notes and whadda'ya know, the distinctive sound of the blues is born. Pretty cool.