“You get your wire off a broom handle. Just unwind it from around the handle and cut it off. . . . It’s funny the way you can take an ordinary broom wire, and it sounds like it’s near six-strings.”—Louis Dotson

The One-strand Guitar

Louis Dotson introduced me to the one-strand guitar that he learned to play as a child. He showed me how he unwound the wire from a broom handle and attached it to the front wall of his home. He plucked the wire with a metal object while he slid a small bottle up and down to change its pitch.

Dotson’s one-strand guitar is related to African one-strand instruments and is an important reminder of how African musical roots survive in the American South. Because it was easily accessible and cost nothing, many blues artists—including B. B. King—played the one-strand guitar as a child. The instrument influenced the bottleneck guitar style popularized by blues performers Elmore James and “Mississippi” Fred McDowell. Today, the bottleneck style is used by musicians like Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, and Keith Richards.

Cane Fife

“I  make my own fifes. The cane grows right down there in the bottom. First you go out there and cut you a piece of cane. You judge the length you want your cane. A two-foot cane is really too long to blow. It’s best a foot or so. And your cane should be a medium size around. Too large a cane, and you can’t tune it. The cane grows from the earth so high, see, and it’s jointed. You pick you out so many joints and cut it off. Then you take your knife and dress it down.

You get you a iron rod, put it in the fire, and get it red hot to make a hole in your cane. If you don’t get your hole large enough, that fife won’t blow good. You got to twist that hot rod around in there so it starts smoking and steaming. You put all them holes in the cane that way.” — Otha Turner

B. B. King’s “Lucille”

“In ’49, I was playing in a place called Twist, Arkansas. It’s about forty-five miles northwest of Memphis, Tennessee. We had a good time there every Friday and Saturday night. In the wintertime, we had a big container—looked like a garbage pail—and we would sit it in the middle of the floor. They would fill it about half full with kerosene—down home they call it coal oil—and they would light this fuel. This was all they had for heat. The people that was used to coming to this place would dance around this big container. You could get about seventy-five or eighty people in there at once, but some nights we would have two, three hundred people. We had what we called the “coming and going crowd.” People would come in, get hot dancing, and walk out. Then others would come in.

This particular night, two guys started fighting, and one of them knocked the other one over on this container of kerosene. When he hit it, it spilled all over the floor. Everybody started trying to put it out, and that made it burn more. Everybody started making for the front door when they figured they couldn’t put it out, including B. B. King. But when I got on the outside, I remembered that I’d left my guitar inside and I went back for it. Guys told me not to do it. The building started to collapse around me, and I almost lost my life trying to save my guitar. The next day we found that two men got trapped in rooms above the dance hall and burned to death. We also found that these same two men were fighting about a lady, and we learned that the lady’s name was Lucille. I never did meet her, but I named my guitar Lucille to remind me never to do a silly thing like that again. “ — B.B. King
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All images from the William R. Ferris Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, unless otherwise noted.