Mike Snowden plays bluesy rock as a one-man band. But he’s not playing a Gibson Les Paul or a Fender Stratocaster – his music comes from a guitar he built from an empty cigar box. “If I met you on the ...

For three years, Archie Storey had been on a steady diet of Mississippi blues and was looking for a way into the music. The longtime BeBop Records employee listened to the blues constantly and ...

Smoking cigars isn’t healthy and touring as a musician can take the fun out of performing, but Mike Snowden of Marietta has found a way to make money and have fun by crafting guitars out of cigar ...

HUNTSVILLE, AL. - What is a cigar box guitar? Technically, it’s a discarded cigar box with a hole for a 1-inch-by-2-inch fretboard. A hodgepodge of random items. Perhaps with a leather cord attached ...

Shane Speal, whose Snake Oil Band headlines the first New Orleans Cigar Box Guitar Festival on Saturday, started out playing something with a little more firepower. “In the ’80s, I was a bass player ...

Back when cigars were plentiful and money was not — especially during the Civil War, for example, or the Great Depression — some musicians decided to work with what they had close at hand and built ...

Bill and Alice Saurber, of “Hamilton’s Only Cigar Box Band,” Pallin’ with Al, recently set sights on America’s Favorite Couple contest. CONTRIBUTED Dayton Porchfest returns this month with 56 bands, ...

It sounds raw. It doesn’t sound like a nice guitar when you pick it up and strum it. It sounds different, unrefined. “You’re talking about a stick with strings on it, and a box wrapped around a stick, ...

There isn’t much about the small house on an average street in a typical Royal Oak neighborhood that would make people think anything out of the ordinary is happening inside. But the cigar box guitars ...

Shane Speal sits at his picnic table in Shiloh, just outside York, PA. The unassuming fellow in an old Devo t-shirt is nonetheless passionate, about music, his band, and cigar box guitars. Three of ...

Charlie Rehfeld’s three-string cigar box guitar, complete with a 1960 black-and-white Texas license plate on the front of the body, is well used and well loved. Maybe not as much as Trigger, Willie ...