“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.
Cigar box banjos often get lost in the shuffle. They are often simple instruments that long ago were made by beginning players from whatever components they had available at the time. Often the first exposure a beginner had to music was from a cigar box made from scratch. Today cigar box banjos can be made from scratch or from a building kit that has all the basic components. Even though they are relatively simple to make their quality of sound and playability doesn’t suffer. It depends on the effort and commitment to excellence the builder is willing to make. Whether made from scratch or from a kit, the builder can let his or her creative imagination run wild while building a unique, well playing instrument.
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.
“Easy Lovin’” was a 1971 country hit that peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard chart by Freddie Hart. Hart was one of many well known people who are not so well known for their banjo playing, but got their first exposure to making music with a cigar box instrument. He grew up in Loachapoka, Alabama in a large, sharecropping family of fifteen children. Freddie said 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.
For others, the roots of their iconic musical style were developed from the very rudiments of instrument making, creating what would scarcely be considered a musical instrument today. Jim Reeves, the youngest of nine children, made his first instrument from a cigar box and rubber bands. Stringbean Akerman made his first banjo from a shoebox with thread from his mother’s sewing kit.
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.
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