Guitarist Rocks Out on Guitars Made from Shovels, Cigar Boxes, Oil Cans, and Whiskey Barrels

Pioneering blues musicians like Robert Johnson, Son House and Leadbelly didn’t have big-bucks to blow at the music store for top notch guitars. Down home on the Delta they made do with whatever was at hand. Modern guitarist Justin Johnson wanted to get back to the source. The funkiest blues rock riffs all come from the same roots, which sprouted from America’s heartland at the end of the nineteenth century.

Guitars can be made from anything

Guitars with seven or eight strings are being explored these days to produce “technical progressive metal compositions.” Justin Johnson went the other way. He took a back to basics tip from Keith Richards. The axe-man for the Rolling Stones was struggling to find his own sound. He “felt he’d gone as far as he could go with the six-string guitar.”

Just for kicks, he got out a pair of wire cutters and following the lead of music legend Ry Cooder, Keith made do with five strings for a while until he found his groove.

It’s easy to turn a six sting into a five but oddly shaped eight-string guitars require some heavy engineering. They “seem like weirdly rococo extravagances next to your average Stratocaster, Tele, or Les Paul,” Open Culture writes.

The wonderful thing about the guitar as a musical instrument is that there is no real “optimal” way to build one. The truth is most people simply buy a model they’re familiar with. Nobody even knows for sure where the modern guitar originated.

Medieval troubadours were well familiar with the 11 string oud and 8-10 string lute. Those models “have ancient heritages that stretch into prehistory.”

During the renaissance, the first guitars “had eight strings, tuned in four ‘courses,’ or pairs, like the modern 12-string,” while “baroque” guitar-like instruments had 10 strings in five courses.”

Music from the hills

Jazz musician George Van Eps had a custom made seven string “built for him by Epiphone Guitars in the late 1930s.” There was also “a signature Gretsch seven-string in the late 60s and early 70s.”

Russian folk guitar models also had seven strings. Six are attributed to “Spanish classical instruments.”

Far back in “the hills, hollars, and deltas of the U.S. south,” all the folk and blues musicians “built guitars out of whatever was at hand, and fit as many, or as few, strings as needed.”

Modern musician Justin Johnson decided to experiment a little, starting with a simple three string shovel.

Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, you can enjoy such classics as “Porch Swing Slidin'” pounded out on a “six-string cigar box-style guitar engraved with a portrait of Robert Johnson.” Who can resist George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” played on an electric oil can.

Then, there’s a little “Ray Charles on a three string cigar box guitar, made mostly out of ordinary items you might find around the shed.” The very first guitars ever made might have been the one string “Diddley Bow” and now you know where Ellas McDaniel picked up his Bo Diddley moniker.