¶ Delta Blues slide banjo dobro steel lap tenor parlor - eBay (item 310178296649 end time Nov-08-09 20:47:46 PST)


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If you looking for a super fun to play Slide guitar and just can't seem to find the sounds of vintage American folk music on your store bought or factory made guitar, this guitar is both easy to play and sounds super great! My only sales pitich is to ask you this....If you're totally and completly bored with playing a regular guitar or tired of the continued invasion of Chinese made products and just can't seem to have fun making music then what you need is to go back to the roots of how American music was made. With a cigar box guitar it will take you back to the lost early days of blues music. On the plantations and in the fields this guitar is nostalgic of an era long gone, these simple, yet elegantly crafted instruments bring to life music once played in the deep south by legendary Bluesmen such as Muddy Waters, Lightin' Hopkin's, Buddy Guy, Hound Dog Taylor, and Big Bill Broonzy, and That ain't but a few!

Muddy Waters defiantly never played a Martin and owning a Resonator guitar was all but a dream, however Muddy Waters did play a cigar box guitar growing up on those banks of the Mississippi River.This guitar is a recreation of the guitars used at the turn of the century by bluesmen in the Southern Delta. This guitar is as natural as they come, but don’t let its simplicity fool you, It took me several hundred hours to transform an old used cigar box into a guitar that will easily outplay any Martin or Taylor in that raw down home Blues.This guitar is the roots of Blues history and I've built it to be the epitome of a Vintage Classic yet this guitar will have a legacy for the next several hundred years. It will still daze and be as captivating then, as it is today.

"...boy, you'd better start a' strum'n that box and play me a ditty, or I'm gona' get off my horse..." "WILD BILL" HICKOCK 1869

so whats all the hub' bub bub of a cigar box guitar??? watch this short video and decide if this is the kind of music you enjoy or would like to play For the Lover of History and the Blues, this is both an historic American guitar and a great sounding fun to play instrument.

Most of you know me and the guitars I build, and that I have a firm belief in that the finest guitars are the ones that allow musicians to express themselves the best, that is the focus and the reason I put so much time and effort into each one of my instruments. This American made guitar is the epitome of handcrafted quality that I've built to play the Blues and Country unlike another. The tone on this guitar is Deep, full, and with a clear tonal scale at any note. Plugged in, this guitar will run circles around any Stratocaster, with way more originality than anything coming out of their factory. I made this guitar to be played, and played Hard. Not only does this guitar make for some serious Eye-Candy, but in reality it is a great player, play Electric slide like Muddy Waters, go chicken pickin', rip out your favorite Hound Dog riffs, or lay low with the bass player and strum it up Willie and Hank style, with a richly, authentic Southern tone.... go from the couch, to on the stage with this guitar, equipped with a pps-615 passive "Rectifier™" pick-up that will deliver in any professional situation. Hand built by JJB Electronics in Bay City M.I., I find they have outstanding tonal quality and are perfect for recording. I only use one pick-up system and its JJB Electronics. That's the mark of quality.

This guitar is constructed around a platform and historical tradition spanning more than 150 years, I've built this guitar for those that want an extremely well crafted guitar that is fun to play, has history, Super original, and is sure to please anyone's ears. This tightly constructed guitar has both sustain and is deep in a tone that can easily match that of any dreadnought acoustic guitar unplugged, yet plugged in can cut heads with anything American or Foreign made. This guitar is not only an easy player, but also, it really puts out that, raunchy, bluesy sound that you've been trying to achieve but just couldn’t find the right instrument to do it with. This guitar has a Pre-war style bridge that is bone set into the body for greater sound board transparency. I was inspired by early vintage parlors and last century Martin's that didn't have a thick piece of wood glued on top that stopped the top from vibrating freely. The hand carved guitar nut I make offers a full, rich tone, and I've compensated the saddle to insure complete intonation that makes playing enjoyable.

I tune all my guitars standard to test construction but there most often tuned OPEN E, OPEN G, A5, D5 root and so on. There’s really a 1001 different ways to tune it and it offers lots of room for individual creativity. This is a FULL sized guitar, with a 25.300 inch (standard American steel-string neck scale length) The over all guitar size is at about the same as most Silvertone, Kay, Stella, and Harmony parlor guitars and most Pre-war Acoustics to hold and play. I built this guitar for the serious person in mind. It will definitely breath life into your playing and rekindle your desire to explore the guitar and play for hours. Cigar box Guitars are great to play jamin' on the couch, especially if you love the Blues...you'll love it and I Know for a fact anyone who hears it or sees you playin' it will be completely blown away..(except your wife...Their never Impressed!!!)

Well, what is a Cigar Box Guitar??????...........The truth is, in the South It's common to hear stories that B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Lightin' Hopkins and all those other old-time blues cats started playing guitar on a cigar box guitar. Not many people who follow Blues and Country music know but, many famous Bluesmen and Country singers started their career on a simple homemade cigar box guitar. One reason most Blues and Country music has such a distinctive sound is because it was derived off of music made on these simple instruments.

To most Americans it's a little know fact that those "po' boys" of the years gone by played the Cigar Box Guitar. Well, this is how they did it...This ain't “Close, but no cigar”....This is following completely in their footsteps with Historical Civil War Era Roots. Cigar Box Guitars are great for a Killer Vintage National Oahu supro or valco sound without plugin' in effects or being reduced to buying an Asian made guitar. Most Acoustics, Resonators, Flattops, Lap Steels and Banjos can't even come close to the true primitive Southern Delta sound these guitars make. These instruments can be channled into a creativity that many musicians desire for a more primal sound. Blues guitarists, in particular, really enjoy playing cigar box guitars in a search of playing Delta Blues in its purest form. Pull this out; people will stare and listen.

This here's a dobro guitar, or in other words it sound's best played as Blues slide guitar...this ain't made for finger pickin' Irish tunes, this box is made for cuttin' blues riffs like the lengeds themself. You can play awesome sounding Slide-Blues, Bluegrass, Country-Blues, plug it in and play City-blues Chicago style or just go strait Twangin' - Banjo style...just about any southern get up n' go you can shake out this stick---- guaranteed to bring a smile and enjoyment to anyone who hears and make em' walk an airline mile just to see! This guitar is crafted with detailed quality and a super tight crisp construction. I built this and every guitar I make with all my Heart while paying careful attention to the fine details and craftsmanship. The result of this experience is an elegant guitar tailored and built for the guitar enthusiast that will definitely spark and excite an interest in your playing. Built to last several lifetimes, this guitar will play and sound just as good 190 years from now as it does today.

Boy's Life Magazine circa 1936

Cigar Box Guitars? Why my pursuit of perfection in building this type of instrument??? I do it in inspiration of old images I see in Americas past. Growing up in New Orleans I've had an obsession since childhood with the music and oral history that has surrounded me in the South. Countless numbers of these contraptions were created by musicians starting about 150 years ago in the Southern American Delta. In those Cotton fields and Plantations of yester-year is where it all started. At the end off the 1860's when money was scarce after the Civil War, there was a passion for music in America and it was overflowing. Sad as it is, but in our nation's history, before the Civil War, the Cigar Box guitar was quoted by a Louisiana Plantation owner as an instrument fit only for "the jig-dancing lower classes of the n!&*%* community..."----Jim Crow had separated whites and blacks with both cultural and musical boundaries. But even as bad as it was back then, there were good people in our new nation, and after the War in about 1870 the majority of people were ready to put aside their prejudices and get on with their lives. The war was over, and as the Union had forgiven the South out of Brotherhood, and as white people embraced the cultures of the black, both Union and Confederate, along with Black and White people, everyone was trying to move on with lives together.

what does the 1880's sound like???

This early time in Amereica was a dificult time for Black americans. They made a whole culture of there pain, we know it as the "Blues". Music was a great and important aspect of early American life. However, when black Americans were given there first view of freedom it was the 1870's and America in ruins, little money was had as a disposable income to buy instruments. One thing for sure about American resilience is ingenuity was abound. After the War both Union and Confederate Soldiers along with now freed Slaves carried the knowledge and appreciation of this creative guitar home to almost every corner of America. Ex-slaves and Soldiers used left over wood boxes, tin cans, string, broom handles, baling and screen wire and whatever else was lying around the house, shed or barn to create their instruments.

It's now a forgotten part of our history, but when enslaved Africans were brought to this country before the 1800's, they came without possessions, but not without their culture. In their memories, their customs, and their ways of looking at their world, they carried their cultural arts with them enslaved to America. These arts would enrich the New World, as Africans and Europeans mixed together and began to build the American way of life. African music, rooted in a distinctive musical tradition, was one of the most important of these cultural arts. The majority of their music was based on simple stringed instruments such as their "banjar"{a gourd with a neck and strings from Africa} which is thought to be the precursor of the American stringed guitar the "Banjo". The best known written accord of this early guitar is probably that of Thomas Jefferson in 1781: "The instrument proper to them {i.e. the slaves} is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa." But because enslaved people didn't have access to their native instruments they quickly adapted and built their own. At the time the basis of this guitar was the cigar box.

The use of a stringed instrument was also a necessity because slaves had many gatherings that called for and involved music. The cigar box guitar was used as an integrated part of there "cakewalk" celebration before it left the plantaion and became popularized by whites.{it was a common religious slaves event were one would put a cake in the middle of the floor and dance around it to music, the best dance (or imatation of there master) would win the cake; an expression that transpired into the American expression "easy as a Cakewalk" i.e.-to be easy or fun or "take's the cake" -to win} The use of this stringed guitar slowly after time made its way into the mainstream of our Southern culture. Being spread from plantation to plantation it eventually evolved into and led to the creation of "The American Banjo". This in turn at the same time in popularizing the use of the steel-string guitar in our culture. This was a fad that slowly spread eastward to the cities and streets of American big cities and clubs (referred to as "parlors" at that time) It helped create the basis of guitar and eventually musically transformed itself again and led to the rise and use of the "Parlor guitar".

During this time the cigar box guitar was influencing all types of folk music which was sweeping thru underground American culture. In the "Root's", however, at the same time as the guitars popularity slowly rose in America, without money or true freedom, a slave, sharecropper, or impoverished person living in the countryside couldn't simply go down to the store and buy a guitar. Thus recreating the cycle of need to make your own guitar. Making a "home-made" guitar was the only choice for the impoverished. This tradition continued for decades among the poor for most of the late 1800's up till and thru the 1930's Depression Era.

Many of the people who built these curious guitars went on to become American best know Blues and Rock stars of the day. Rock 'n Roll pioneer Carl Perkins reminisced about his childhood cigar box guitar that he made with a box, stick and baling wire. Years later, he would take the knowledge he first learned on that down-home axe to create "Blue Suede Shoes." That sure got Elvis to stand up strait the first time he heard that, after that HE WAS HOOKED on the BLUES!!! "Beans" Hambone, Blind Willie Johnson, and Charlie Christian, are actually some of the people who have been known to even record with this amazing instrument. Not only that, because most of these basic guitars usually didn't have frets, the po' folk needed a way to play them......That is what is thought to be the creation of slide guitar in the Southern Delta.

The precursor to the cigar box guitar as an instrument was the diddly-bow. It was a one stringed instrument where you would take a Coke bottle or Rum neck and run it up and down a string to achieve the tone you’re after. Those crude instruments along with the cigar box guitar is what melded into the form of slide guitar were familiar with today. From Son House, Robert Johnson, to Muddy Waters and Elmore James they were all influenced in some way by these instruments following in there career as slide players. That’s where the blues and slide guitar truly started at. On those plantations and cotton fields the cigar box guitar and 'field hollerin' went hand in hand. Blues players didn't play Gibsons, Resophonic or Weissenborn! They couldn't afford them. B.B. King growing up a poor Cotton sharecroppers son dreamed of buying his first guitar from the Sears catalog, After going to the local 5 and Dime his father knew he didn’t even have enough money for even food much less $2 for a used Stella guitar, His only option was to "hit" the shed, and it's well documented he made his son's first guitar from a simple cigar box. It's also been quoted that a schoolmate of the Legendary Blues guitarist Charlie Christian, said:

"[Charlie] would amaze us at school with his first guitar - one that he made with a cigar box. He would be playing his own riffs...but they were based on sophisticated chords and progressions that Blind Lemon Jefferson never knew." -Ralph Ellison, schoolmate of Charlie Christian.

Taken form a direct quote from Lightin' Hopkins was;

"So I went ahead and made me a guitar. I got me a cigar box, I cut me a round hole in the middle of it, take me a little piece of plank, nailed it onto that cigar box, and I got me some screen wire and I made me a bridge back there and raised it up high enough that it would sound inside that little box, and got me a tune out of it. I kept my tune and I played from then on." -Lightin' Hopkins Photo Courtesy of Shane W. Speal Sr. and the Cigar Box Guitar History Museum

This story about what would make a poor person use a cigar box for a guitar in the first place began in the mid 1800's .....The Cigar boxes that were familiar with didn’t exist prior to the 1840’s. Prior to then, cigars were shipped in larger crates containing 100 or more per case. But after 1842, due to exploration of the "West" cigar manufacturers started using smaller, more portable boxes with only 20-50 cigars per box. In the Old West, as well as most of the 19th cigars were extremly popular, Card games, Saloon'n and Of coarse those great Mississippi Paddleboats spread them throughout the south, because of the widespread popularity of smoking in those days, many empty cigar boxes would be just laying around . Unlike times are today, the 1800’s was a simpler time for Americans, when necessity was truly the mother of invention. Being that most American music was based off of stringed instruments, using a cigar box to create a guitar, fiddle, or a banjo was an obvious choice for a few crafty souls. The earliest proof of a instrument made from a cigar box that has been found is an etching of two Civil War Soldiers at a campsite with one playing a cigar box instrument as another tired soldier relaxed near by to listen. Those humble beginnings are what eventually gave the Cigar box Guitar a home in music history....Now even the Smithsonian Museum In Washington D.C. has an early homemade Cigar Box Guitar on display c.1861 to show Americans true pride and the roots of all our guitar-playin' Soul--- Now that’s the Cigar Box Blues Baby!

If you've read this far I'd like to say Thanks for taking the time to read this and If you like this guitar you'd probably love to see some of the other Handmade American guitars I have built, some with exotic detailed airbrushing, inlay art and craftsmanship that can only be found in rare luthier built guitars.... Google my name Red Dog Guitars to learn more about me or see my work. If this is the first time you've seen one of my guitars allow me to tell you about myself. I've never been trained in any type of woodworking or luthier construction but I am a sought after guitar builder due to my creativity. Since I'm not trained in any form of carpentry I prefer to call myself a craftsman with a passion for history. I have been building all forms of guitar since I was in my early teen's, because of this and my experience and willingness to try something unconventional is why I have gained an strong instinct of a guitars strengths and weakness'. I sell my guitars as the highest quality playable art or "Outsider Art" that doesn't just rival Martin or Taylor but easily outshines them in originality due to my construction themes. I'm only going to make so many guitars in my lifetime, so because of that I try to build the best to my best capability and always try to build better than I did before. There are allot of people in the Collectable Guitar and Vintage Guitar market that are switching from well built production assembly line guitars like Guild and Paul Reed Smith to hand built guitars because of the quality and the fact that their a safer form of investment as the market gets overly saturated with Fenders and Gibsons, or even worse copies. Often people tell me they buy my guitars strictly in the since of rarity and the quality of a true Red Dog Guitar's sound. Something I've spent many years to "coin" and build in my guitars. I am a one person builder with the occasional help from my wife. Everything I do is by hand, pocketknife (ol' Timer or McCoy) file, sandpaper and chisel. It's not because I don’t want to use power tools, but for the simple reason that I achieve far, far superior results sanding and cutting by hand. I’m also more in touch with the instrument and believe it's a defining factor in any guitars quality. I do not desire to build the best...Only to build the best to my ability that God has given me. I've built guitars for people all over the world, there found in numerous art galleries and museums and I sold them to just about every type, from the Rich and Famous to the starving artist. Some of my best guitars can be found in almost all the European countries as American Folk music and the Blues has an extremely loyal following there.

*** Foriegn Bidders always Welcome to bid. *** Shipping ANYWHERE in Europe, Germany or the UK $32 It's a fair chance and way for anyone to own a Red Dog Guitar.....FROM THE ARTIC CIRCLE, TO THE DEEP CONGO $32 US! You have a house? I will get it there provided your payment in FULL clears... Airmail 10 to 14 days,.. read FORIEGN payment instuctions below. Shipping ANYWHERE IN AMERICA or Australia $32 If you have any further questions about this guitar call me at 1-(787)-671-9790,ask for John. Daytime till 8pm or so.

I'm about to start listing guitars that will blow your mind, even if you never intend on bidding, click this link Add to Favorite Sellers you won't want to miss them, some will be famous a few years from now. At least you'll be able to say you saw it!

        Red Dog Guitars strives to adopt the use of alternative construction
          techniques that avoid waste and make better use of our planets
     valuable and in many cases irreplaceable resources.

Anyhow, Even if you don't Bid, I'd like to say THANKS for Taking the time to read the history about these wonderful interesting guitars I make, once you see one or play one, they always become a passion!

this video below will burn your ear hairs off!!!!!!

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