Folk Art Instruments

Oil Can Banjo is on loan to the Highlands Historical Society by Shane Speal.

Necessity, poverty and skilled craftsmanship combined to allow settlers in America to create their own musical instruments from any available resource. Much as they did to introduce the banjo to America, enslaved people built their own guitars and other instruments out of whatever they were able to get their hands on. The variety and ingenuity of the musician creating their instrument can be seen in cigar box guitars, pie tin banjos and gourd stringed instruments throughout the mountains of western North Carolina. Hard times could not stop the music, as banjos and other folk instruments were whittled and innovated out of anything that could hold a note.

As a particular example, the origin of cigar box guitars can be traced back to the 1840’s with the rapid proliferation of a portable cigar box, whose size formed the perfect resonator for a low-cost, hand-crafted instrument. In 1876, an etching by artist Edwin Forbes, showing two Civil War soldiers at a campsite with one playing a cigar box fiddle, was first published. In 1890, Daniel Carter Beard , the co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America, published plans on how to build a 5-string, fretless banjo from a cigar box as part of Beard’s American Boy’s Hand Book. The Great Depression of the 1930’s saw a rise in the use of cigar box instruments, providing a much needed source of entertainment in trying times. In Appalachia, the need for cigar box instruments continued for much longer than most of the rest of the United States. After all, if a musician has a story to tell, they will find a way to tell it regardless of circumstances.