Cigar Box Guitar

Overview

The cigar box guitar (commonly abbreviated CBG) is a folk-craft plucked-string instrument built from a cigar box (used as the resonating body), a broomstick or other long stick (used as the neck), and one to six strings. Wikidata’s entry describes it as a basic musical-instrument design built around a cigar box, typically using recycled, repurposed, or scavenged components — a definitional focus on salvaged construction that is unusual for any standard musical-instrument entry.

The instrument is associated particularly with the early-20th-century African American Mississippi Delta blues tradition, where it served as the affordable home-built first instrument for many later-influential blues musicians, including Lightnin’ Hopkins, Carl Perkins, and Blind Willie Johnson. The CBG has had a substantial revival since the late 1990s, driven by a worldwide community of hobbyist builders and players.

Origin & History

The cigar box guitar emerged in the mid-19th-century United States, in the period after the American Civil War (1861-1865) when cardboard cigar boxes became a widely-available consumer-discard item. The 1840 introduction of the lightweight wooden cigar box (replacing earlier larger crates) gave home builders a small, well-constructed wooden box ideally sized for a small instrument body.

The earliest documented cigar-box instruments — fiddles as well as guitars — appear in American folk and Civil War-era contexts in the 1860s and 1870s. The instrument spread through the rural American South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the standard affordable first instrument for poor families. It is associated particularly with the African American Mississippi Delta blues tradition that emerged around the turn of the 20th century. Many of the canonical Delta blues musicians began their playing careers on home-built cigar box guitars before moving to factory-made guitars; some — including Carl Perkins — built and continued to play CBGs throughout their professional careers.

The cigar box guitar largely fell out of practical use after the mid-20th century, displaced by inexpensive factory-made guitars (the Sears Roebuck and Silvertone catalogues) and by the wider economic improvement of the post-WWII rural South. A revival began in the late 1990s, driven by the internet-enabled connection of hobbyist builders worldwide. A dedicated CBG museum in Huntsville (Alabama) opened in 2010; an annual festival circuit (the Mississippi event, the Huntsville national gathering) and a wide commercial marketplace for both finished CBGs and parts kits have grown alongside the revival.

The MET catalogue does not hold a dedicated cigar-box-guitar collection, but the museum’s wider plucked-lute holdings — Mandolino 505783 (Italian, c.1710), Melophone 501776 (French, c.1850-55) — illustrate the historical European context of small folk-craft plucked instruments from which the American cigar box guitar partly descends.

Construction & Materials

A standard cigar box guitar consists of three main components. The body is a wooden cigar box — typically 15 to 25 cm wide, 20 to 30 cm long, and 5 to 8 cm deep. The neck is a length of straight hardwood (broomstick, oak board, or repurposed lumber), about 60 to 75 cm long, with a fretboard and tuning machines at the headstock end. The strings (one, three, four, or six) run from a tailpiece at the bottom of the box, over a movable bridge on the soundboard, up the neck, and end at the tuning machines.

Frets may be inset into the fretboard (in the manner of a standard guitar) or, in the more traditional style, marked only with simple lines or omitted entirely (in which case the instrument is played fretless or with a slide). Pickups (in modern electric CBGs) are typically simple piezo-disc transducers or homemade single-coil designs.

The defining design feature is the use of repurposed or salvaged components throughout — cigar box for the body, broomstick or scrap lumber for the neck, salvaged strings, often homemade or scavenged tuning machines. The CBG community treats this salvaged-materials tradition as central to the instrument’s identity; high-end CBGs that use new commercial components are sometimes regarded by purists as outside the tradition.

How It’s Played

Three main playing styles dominate. Three-string slide uses an open tuning (typically G-D-G or G-B-D) and a glass or metal slide worn on the left hand, in the manner of Delta blues bottleneck guitar. Three-string fingerstyle uses the same tuning without a slide, with the right hand fingerpicking simple bass-and-melody patterns. Four-string standard uses a guitar-like tuning (D-G-B-E or G-D-G-B) and is played with a plectrum or with fingerpicking technique similar to a standard guitar.

Standard repertoire includes traditional blues, folk, and country songs that work well with the open-tuned slide approach: Robert Johnson, Skip James, and Charley Patton blues; old-time American folk songs; and a substantial original repertoire developed by the modern revival community.

Cultural Significance

The cigar box guitar’s cultural significance is twofold. As a historical instrument it connects to the early-20th-century African American Delta blues tradition and to the wider rural American folk-craft tradition of building musical instruments from available materials. As a contemporary revival instrument it has become a symbol of a wider DIY, maker-movement, and post-2008-recession resourcefulness aesthetic.

The CBG community is unusually decentralised and online-driven. Cigarboxnation.com (the largest online community), the annual festival circuit, dozens of regional builder clubs, and a thriving YouTube tutorial ecosystem have grown the instrument from near-extinction in 1990 to a substantial worldwide hobby practice today.

Notable Examples & Recordings

• Skip James, Devil Got My Woman (1931 recordings) — though Skip James played a standard guitar in the 1931 Paramount sessions, his earlier home-built instrumental experience was on cigar box guitars.
• Lightnin’ Hopkins’s reported childhood cigar-box-guitar playing.
• Seasick Steve, Dog House Music (2006) — the most internationally visible modern blues recording featuring CBG, played on his three-string “Trance Wonder”.
• Justin Johnson’s solo CBG instructional and performance recordings — modern technical reference.
• Mike Snowden, the prolific contemporary builder and player who has effectively defined the modern CBG aesthetic.

Related Instruments

• Diddley bow — the single-string American folk lute, often a CBG ancestor.
• Mountain dulcimer / Appalachian dulcimer — the related American folk fretted lute.
• Acoustic guitar — the standard factory-made cousin.
• Slide guitar — the playing technique that the CBG most often uses.
• Mouth bow — the simpler single-string folk relative.
• Lap steel guitar — the modern professional descendant of the slide-guitar tradition.

Where to Hear It

In the US: the Mississippi-state CBG festival held annually, the national gathering at Huntsville (Alabama), and the regular Huntsville-museum events. Internationally: the European Cigar Box Guitar Festival (held in various European locations), the YouTube tutorial-and-performance ecosystem, and a growing presence at standard blues and Americana festivals worldwide. Recording labels are mostly independent and direct-to-streaming.

• Wikipedia: Cigar box guitar
• Wikidata: Cigar box guitar (Q2076945)
• DBpedia: Cigar box guitar
• Wikimedia Commons: Cigar box guitars

Learning Resources

A starter cigar box guitar from a hobby maker or kit costs 50 to 200 USD; quality finished CBGs from established builders (Mike Snowden, C. B. Gitty, Daddy Mojo) run 200 to 600 USD; high-end concert-quality instruments from boutique luthiers run 800 USD upward. Building from scratch is an established part of the tradition — kits from Cigar Box Nation, C. B. Gitty Crafter Supply, and similar suppliers provide the parts for under 100 USD. Pedagogy: Justin Johnson’s instructional video series, the Shane Speal CBG tutorial channel, and the active Cigarboxnation.com forum cover the central modern teaching tradition.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the cigar box guitar really made from a cigar box?
Traditionally yes. Modern boutique CBGs sometimes use specially-made wooden boxes that look like cigar boxes; the salvaged-materials tradition is part of the instrument’s identity but not strictly required by the contemporary community.

How many strings does a cigar box guitar have?
Most commonly three or four. One-string (the diddley bow relative), six-string, and even more-stringed versions exist; three-string is the most popular configuration in the modern revival community.

How is a cigar box guitar tuned?
Most commonly in an open tuning that allows slide playing across all strings — G-D-G, G-B-D, or D-G-D for three-string CBGs; D-G-B-E or G-D-G-B for four-string CBGs.

Can you play standard guitar music on a CBG?
Standard six-string guitar music does not transfer directly because of the smaller string count and different tuning. The CBG has its own repertoire focused on blues, slide, and fingerstyle approaches.

Is the cigar box guitar a real instrument?
Yes — recognised by Wikidata, by major museums (the MET’s wider plucked-lute collection contextualises it; a dedicated museum in Huntsville Alabama covers it specifically), and by an active worldwide community of builders, players, and recording artists.