"The Cigar Box Guitar Maker"
When a promising rock musician tired of the road and the pressure, he gave up music and got a job at a hardware store. Then one day, he had a revelation.
Dear Friends,
Mike Snowden was born to play music—and found early success as a touring rock musician. So when the pressures of the road (and the recording industry) pushed him away from the rocker’s lifestyle, his passion for music needed a new outlet. He found it in an unusual craft: making guitars out of cigar boxes.
This week, we’re bringing back this favorite tale from our first year of publishing, now available in a new format. And since our audience has grown by leaps and bounds since we released the original in 2015, the story will be all-new to most of you. I hope you will enjoy the audio version of “The Cigar Box Guitar Maker,” written by Nancy LeBrun and narrated by Avanthika Srinivasan. It’s available on our website, or wherever you like to get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also read the original story on our site, free of charge and free of ads.
Other news: As an independent, not-for-profit publication, we have brought you original stories at no charge and with no ads since our founding in 2015—while continuing to pay our contributors fair market rates for their work. To help support this work, we’re now developing a reader-supported channel here on Substack. As we work on our new premium offerings for paid subscribers, we humbly ask you to become an early subscriber.
As a thank you for subscribing early, we are offering a reduced subscription rate of $5/month (or $50/year)—and we’re now extending this special offer for a few more days. Subscribe by July 15 July 25 to permanently lock in this reduced rate, even when our rates go up.
Because accessibility is built in to our mission, many of our offerings, including our biggest new features, will remain available to all of our followers—paid or unpaid. But we hope that our forthcoming extras, along with whatever goodwill we have accumulated over the years, will entice you to support us with a paid subscription at this very affordable rate—with our heartfelt thanks. (P.S., you can also gift a reduced-rate subscription to anyone you choose, using the button below.)
Each Friday throughout an issue, we release a feature story, short article, mini-documentary, photo essay, or podcast that relates to our mission—to “create a world built to last.” Our current issue on “The Music Makers” will wrap up next week, followed by our usual, late-summer hiatus from weekly publishing to allow us to focus on new projects—including our upcoming Fall issue on “The Art of Repair.”
In the meantime, I hope you'll always find something intriguing to read, watch, or listen to within our pages. We welcome your thoughts via email, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Thank you for reading and sharing our stories, for donating to our cause as you can, and for being such a loyal part of the Craftsmanship community.
Sincerely,
Todd Oppenheimer
Editor & Publisher, Craftsmanship
Summer 2023: The Music Makers
There may be no other craft that lends itself to infinite experimentation more than music—an endeavor that has nursed human creativity ever since the earliest days of the Stone Age, on every continent and in every culture. This summer, as music festivals and concert tours return in full force, we offer you a fresh collection of stories highlighting some of our most interesting (and unusual) musicians, instrument makers, and other masters of music.