The sound is unlike anything coming out of a standard six-string guitar on low-lit, smoky Saturday nights. It’s something more primitive and gritty, sometimes plaintive, sometimes giddy. The songs of a cigar box guitar are music to the ears of Jeremy Klutts in West Point. Klutts is the city’s code enforcement officer by avocation, a blues fan for recreation.
This maker of cigar box guitars served in the U.S. Navy for almost a decade and later worked on ships around the globe for a private contractor. During downtime, he studied up on the history of the blues and American music rooted in the Deep South.
“A lot of your old players, something like this would be their first instrument,” said Klutts, idly plucking the strings of a box guitar he handcrafted using a handsome black Don Leoncio Gran Reserva box as a resonator. His models range from one to four strings.
The organic sound takes listeners back to more hardscrabble times, when a hot, sharecropper sun baked dusty yards and young boys like Charley Patton down in Hinds County and later the Delta, and Willie King near the Mississippi-Alabama line pulled wire out of a screen door, off a broom or bale of hay and nailed it to a board to make rudimentary music. Poverty was the origin of many an humble diddley bo or box instrument.
Trace evidence of pieces made with cigar boxes dates back to the 1840s, according to William Jehle in “One Man’s Trash: A History of the Cigar Box Guitar.” The earliest known illustrated proof of one is an etching copyrighted in 1876 of two American Civil War soldiers at a campsite, one playing a box fiddle. The Great Depression of the 1930s saw a resurgence of homemade musical instruments. With a washtub bass, jugs, harmonica and a cigar box guitar or fiddle, many old-time blues, jazz and folk musicians found their voice.
Revival
With an increase in cigar box guitar builders and performers, something of a revival surfaced around the country. As artists including Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, the North Mississippi Allstars’ Luther Dickinson, Tom Waits and Paul McCartney picked them up to play, new generations took notice. Listen closely: The bluesy, rootsy sound has seeped into several tributaries of American music.
Klutts and his wife, Lisa, returned to their own roots by moving back to the Golden Triangle from Norfolk, Virginia, in 2005. Lisa is originally from Caledonia. Jeremy was born in Clay County. After watching bluesman Ben Prestage perform on a cigar box guitar, Klutts’ interest was piqued. He made his first one around 2006, using one of his wife’s old crafts boxes.
Today he prefers only select wooden cigar boxes he gleans from different sources. The timing may not always be prime.
“I remember one time we went on family vacation to Chattanooga,” Lisa Klutts said. “Jeremy went to a cigar store, and we came home with eight big, black garbage bags of cigar boxes! There was no room for the kids or luggage,” she laughed.
Her husband makes his guitar necks from red oak in the garage and builds each instrument with a pickup. He harvests other features from his finds.
“I like discovering dilapidated guitars at thrift stores, or sometimes people give them to me,” said the artisan whose guitars took Best in Show at Starkville’s 2012 Cotton District Arts Festival.
Klutts hopes to try his hand at making a few lap slide guitars soon.
“There are a lot of things I want to do … it’s finding the time.”
Ken Ivy of West Point owns two cigar box guitars; he finger picks and plays them with slides he makes from the necks of wine or olive oil bottles. He sometimes can be found playing harmonica on stage with Mookie Wilson.
“Jeremy has taken that idea of the simple guitars and improved on it and turned them into useful pieces of artwork as musical instruments,” Ivy remarked.
For Klutts, bringing that artwork into the world is nothing short of a creative outlet.
“There are no rules to this,” he said. “That’s why it’s totally fun.”
Editor’s note: For more information about Jeremy Klutts’ cigar box guitars, email him at [email protected].
Jan Swoope is the Lifestyles Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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