Join us for the Kazoo Horns, Bazookas, and Slow Drag: Box Guitars and Homemade Instruments Exhibit Opening on Thursday, January 19th at 5:00 PM CST in the First Floor Gallery at the New Orleans Jazz Museum.
About Kazoo Horns, Bazookas, and Slow Drag: Box Guitars and Homemade Instruments:
It is almost certain that humans have been making their own instruments since there have been humans. There is something inherent in our species and development that makes us want to create and express ourselves. Whether it was using bones to bang on hollow trees, whistling, or hitting vessels with different amounts of water to make melodies, humans have been making music and rhythm. As they say, the first sound we hear in the uterus is rhythm in the heartbeat of our mother. Children as they grow up take blades of grass and press them together with their thumbs and blow through them to make a primitive reed sound. People need to make sound, so they make things to make sound. In early America, commercial instruments were expensive for the average citizen, but people often made their own. Cigar boxes were a preferred component of these as cigars and the boxes they came in were popular and found in most homes. They could be used as bodies for fiddles, guitars, diddley bows, and banjos. Many musicians started this way. Early rock and roller Carl Perkins and seminal bluesman Blind Willie Johnson started with homemade instruments. As commercial instruments became less expensive and more widely distributed, homemade instruments became less popular, but were still played in the more isolated parts of the country like lumberjack camps in the Appalachian Mountains and levee camps in Mississippi. The historical photos on display here show many settings for these instruments.
In New Orleans and in Louisiana, people have been making music and instruments since the city was settled. Many kids started “spasm” bands with instruments they made to play for themselves, their families, and tips on the street Early jazzman Emile “Stalebread” Lacoumbe is pictured in this exhibit with his fellow young Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band members. In his autobiography A Life In Jazz, Danny Barker remembers forming his early spasm band “The Boozan Kings,” “There were many spasm bands in the city. They played all sorts of gadgets that produced sounds: musical saws, washboards, spoons, bells, pipes, sandpaper, xylophones…tub basses, kazoos, ram horns, steer horns, bugles, tin flutes…I organized a spasm band. I named it the Boozan Kings. The word “Boozan” is Creole. The folks spoke of parties as boozans.” Barker’s band had a kazoo, drums, ukulele, harp, banjo ukulele, and suitcase. Today, these types of bands and activities continue whether it is local trad and jug bands playing instruments they have made or kids putting bottle caps on their sneakers to tap dance for tourists tossing coins. Those players and this exhibit is a tribute both to the human spirit and the enduring creative impulses in New Orleans and elsewhere that drive people to make instruments and make music with them.