Smokehouse Guitars

This interview went really well and I’m more than pleased with Paul’s work.

I’ve added a guestbook to the site.  You can find a link to it at the top of the page.  Stop by and leave me a message, why don’t you?

Josh

I only started doing this stuff a year ago…

Yesterday Ashley Cook and Paul Gallaher (reporter and photographer from My Valley News) came out to my house to talk about cigar box guitars.  The experience was surreal to say the least.  If there was any point in my life that I was going to give an interview, I would have expected it to be related to my professional life and not something I do for pleasure.  Go figure.

Throughout the whole thing I kept trying to find the right words to explain why folks like me feel the way we do about cigar box guitars and American blues history.  I know that if I were wittier, I could probably come up with some kind of blurb that really summarized the experience.  I just don’t have the skill.

A big part of this all for me is that I literally feel more connected to blues musicians now long dead.  Just about every kind of music that we listen to in this country today owes something to the earliest blues musicians, for better of worse.  Just as Africa was the cradle of human civilization. so too was the American South the cradle of the major music genres that we all listen to today (rock, R&B, pop, hip hop, rap, and I’m sure that country has a stake in this as well).  When I pick up a cigar box guitar, I can just about hear Leadbelly grunting over his twelve string, making the same sounds he did when he swung a sledge on the chain gang.

I think what is effecting me the most is the transportive quality of the instruments I make.  Once upon a time, we used to write letters to each other on paper.  We used to gather around the radio and listen to old shows like The Bickersons or Amos and Andy.  When we needed something, we would build it ourselves half the time.  If we couldn’t build it ourselves, we probably didn’t need it.  We sure as hell didn’t go to Wallmart to get it.

For a ten year old, a lazy afternoon fishing down by the creak or catching frogs was the perfect day.  Men had tools out in the shed and they certainly didn’t wear anything like “guy liner” (are you kidding me?).  We weren’t plugged in to machines every waking moment of the day searching desperately for the next big social networking site, absolutely starved for some kind of connection.

There was a time when kids actually learned how to play the guitar instead of just trying to break their high score on Guitar Hero.

I guess that’s what it’s all about for me.  I’m just missing a time that was ending for good when I was a little kid growing up in the 80′s.  Nintendo had only just come on the scene for us then and we could only stand to play it for about an hour or two before we had to get outside or risk going crazy.  We used to do things like break our arms falling off of rope swings or get in fights or roll through the mud or shoot cans with our BB guns instead of schedule play dates or raid an instanced dungeon with our guild or look up the latest FAIL video on youtube or text each other with our god damned iPhones.

This is how I’m holding on to all the good things that aren’t here any more.  This is how I remind myself that there was a time when I didn’t feel like a zombie at the end of the day from all of the 1′s and 0′s that poor into my head.  This is how I try to remember that the people who were here before me were responsible, whereas now we all just seem to be entitled.

At the end of my day, this is how I silence the din.

The article goes in to print next week.  I’ll be posting it on Twitter, Facebook, my website, all my message groups, MySpace, and e-mailing it to everyone I know rather than just calling them up and telling them about it.  Then I’m going to go lock myself in the garage, hide under my workbench, and scream or something.

Josh