Cigar boxes and music may seem an unlikely combination but during Downtown Mansfield’s First Friday Shop Hop Artspace visitors learned that Jess Allred’s craftsmanship unites the two beautifully. His cigar box guitars will remain on display through Sunday, and visitors will find that not all of his guitars are made from cigar boxes.
The craft also came on the heels of refurbishing hotrods. One the guitars he won’t part with bears the Montana license plate from his last hotrod. Allred wanted something new to do after reading about cigar box guitars, he started TotalRojo. Wonder where the name comes from? The answer can be found on his blogspot.
In the following interview Allred is represented by the initials TRG, TotalRojo Guitars. One additional note is that Allred also builds 9-volt amplifiers to accompany his guitars.
RB: When did you start building guitars?
TRG: I started building about 3 ½ years ago. When I retired and we moved back to Montana in 2003, I was working on cars. I finished up my last car and I had to have a hobby. Flying back and forth to see our kids here, I got tired of riding on the airplanes, so we decided to relocate back here where our sons and grandchildren were. We relocated in 2005. After refurbing the house, I was reading a magazine and I read this little short in a magazine about cigar box guitars and I thought I could do that.
He started researching and found some websites that he said influenced him a great deal.
RB: Do you play guitar?
TRG: Oh yeah, I’ve had a Martin acoustic guitar for 30 years. I play around with these guitars, but I’m not going on stage, certainly not to play.
RB: How do you decide whether to make a three string or four string guitar?
TRG: I never build two alike…ever. I look at a box and I think how will it work? What wood do I want to use for the neck: walnut, cherry, oak, whatever? I use a variety of woods, rosewood or whatever. Then I think about the headstock and how I want to shape it. And then I put that together and decide on the number of strings.
His acoustic guitars are six string guitars which use commercial necks.
TRG: The key to making most any guitar, in addition to the type of wood and the style of the body, is the distance of the strings, from the nut to the saddle, and the spacing of the frets. The strings length from the nut to the saddle is absolutely critical. And that dictates the spacing of every fret. I always use the same length: 25.4 inches. If you can get those right, then it’s tuner, strings, and quality of the wood. It’s experimentation.
RB: How many have you made?
TRG: After I built 100 cigar box guitars, I started building these [Indicating one of the six-string guitars on display, guitars that resulted from inspiration or repurposed items.] A year ago this month I had heart surgery and while I was in the hospital, my surgeon, who I got to talking with, and I found out that we both like guitars. He encouraged me to build acoustics and I said, ‘Ah, I don’t know,’ but he talked me into it. So I haven’t been messing with cigar boxes for a while. I’ve been building full-size Martin-style acoustic guitars.
RB: Where do you get your cigar boxes? Are they vintage?
TRG: I have 200 cigar boxes in my basement right now. Some are vintage, but no, not all of them. I sometimes find, as I go to swap meets, antique boxes. I have two suppliers who save boxes for me; and if I go on a trip, if I see a cigar store in town, I stop by and I’ll come out with 10 or 12 boxes. I like all wood boxes.
RB: I imagine you have to consider the construction of the box for how you’ll build the guitar.
TRG: This guitar, for instance, is made out of a silver serving dish. It’s a repurposed serving dish. I made a surround and it’s got a through-body neck. It’s all one piece. So what I had to do to make this work is build a surround shaped like the serving bowl and I glued it to the neck and I glued a piece of maple on it. It sounds a little like a banjo because of the serving bowl.
RB: Do you sell them?
TRG: Yes, but I’ve given a lot of them away over the years. A lady in Chicago came up with this idea that some of us builders maybe wanted to donate our guitars to service people if they wanted them. The government is kind of funny, and in order to send stuff to Afghanistan and Iraq during the war, you can’t just send stuff over there. They [armed services personnel] have to request it. She came up with this idea to go to the government and see if we could get this going. And we did, and a guy who works in the Pentagon also builds cigar box guitars and so he got us all wrapped up for this. So on Cigar Box Nation, which is a site that supports this sort of thing, they put a blurb on the site saying anybody who is a serviceman interested in a free guitar, let us know and we’ll build one for you.
I built probably 30 but I built 16 that went to Bastion’s hospital in Afghanistan to doctors, nurses, corpsmen and a couple of Canadian guys too because it was a Canadian/U.S. venture. So I have a lot of guitars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, North Africa, the Sea of Japan, and ports like North Carolina and place where people who’ve had them were aboard ship and then they came back to port.
RB: You have a sense of humor and that influences your work—like the guitar you made from an oak toilet seat.
TRG: That one went to Michael Castle in Columbus. It was on display at the Art Center and I took a toilet seat and made a six-string electric guitar out of it. I didn’t want to sell it, but he changed my mind. I had a ‘Not of Sale’ sign on it, but he came in and started playing it and I got a call asking to sell it. It was pretty cool. He plays it on stage in Columbus. He’s a rocker down in Columbus.
Allred’s guitars and his full story can be found on his blog, and a number of them are on display through Sunday at Artspace, 106 N. Main St., Manfield.
