Dave Clark, based on a very strong suggestion from his wife, looked for a retirement hobby. She had bought him a magazine about whittlin’ but that did not take off (shades of Sheriff Taylor sittin’ on the porch whittlin’ away on a stick! - NOT!). In early 2014 he discovered a book on making guitars from cigar boxes. The author, he later learned, was the prime mover of the cigar box guitar (CBG) revival in the USA.
CBG building is a combination of the technical and the artistic. Having taken numerous night-school art and design classes at Georgian College, back in the day, and looking at developing some woodworking skills, Dave found a nice match.
His first and subsequent early builds were all handcrafted; “I wanted to stay true to the origins of CBGs, so I used handsaws, files, chisels, and did lots of hand-sanding.” The origin of CBGs is pre-civil war in the southern states. Those guitars, and fiddles, were fashioned with whatever cigar boxes, scrap wood, and scrap wire, often fence wire, people could find. Some were one-string “diddley bows” others had one, two, three, maybe four strings.
Some of the great Blues artists, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and B.B. King started with CBGs.
Since 2014 he has built about 60 or so CBGs, about 30 of those during COVID-19 house-bound restrictions. Three were custom builds for local musicians. As a guest artist, his CBGs were displayed and sold at the Artists’ Co-op and sold through Heartwood.
“Pre-covid I ran a number of workshops at Lee Valley in Waterloo,” says Clark. He was able to teach the technical aspects of the builds, but not the musical aspects that are important to making them sound right. “I am lucky to get musicians in the workshops who steered me right.” He also tapped the knowledge of a few musicians he knows. Custom builds are designed around what the musician wants.
His builds are mostly fretless, acoustic-electric combos. Each piece is unique in that Clark will use a range of new and old parts, and experiment. Bridges have been made with Lego, brass toilet bolts, antique fountain pen, and old piano tuning pegs. On a recent build Clark used 45-record centre disks for sound-hole covers. Old gate handles and drawer pulls make great bridge covers.
His favourite is his political statement Trump cigar box build. (Trump cigars were made in Montreal in about the 1920s to 1940s.)
“Back in 2020 I posted it on several CBG Facebook groups and had great interest, with comments ranging from “f$%* Trump” to “I want one of those”. Some of the components built into the design include strings of steel fish line (being fished for fools); a toilet bolt bridge (which hold a toilet tight against the floor so crap does not run out; very small sound holes to reflect the desire of a particular politician to want to silence the “other”; an antique fountain pen to represent governance by Executive Orders; and hand-forged nails in the body to represent a sort-of coffin - of those lost to violence and a seriously mismanaged federal response to COVID-19.
Dave says he is a “big music lover, with interests ranging from Big Band to folk to rock, and “the Pipes”, but can’t play a damned note”. His wife and two daughters can read and play music; one is a music teacher. But that has not helped him. (So don’t ask why he bought a Theremin.)
Clark says he is waiting to get back to building guitars, once he can get into a lumber yard to pick through the 1”x2” maple. Learning to play is high on the list of nexts, when we are again confined.
