Rotten Roger’s Diddley Bows

(I met “Rotten Roger" at a Craft Fair in town several years ago. I hope he’s still teaching kids Americana music someplace. I bought this advanced version of a diddley bow from him. Since it is a right-handed instrument, I have to turn it upside down to play it. Maybe I’d better stick to the one-string version!)

“Rotten Rodger,” the alter-ego name he has given himself, is all tongue-in-cheek. His last name, which he doesn’t use, is spelled “Pfalzgral,” and he comes from Staunton, IL. Sizing him up, it’s hard to tell who he is, from front to back. He’s got a sales shtick down and he makes the curious, laugh. His delivery is deadpan, and he’s got kind eyes, like those old photos of General Stonewall Jackson. He doesn’t share easily, but he says he’s a classically trained musician of stringed instruments.

I trained for over four years, six days a week, for flamingo and classical guitar,’ he said. “I was overqualified for rock-and-roll. Rock and roll plays three chords for a thousand people and a classical guitarist plays a thousand chords for three people.”

You get the idea. He has trouble being serious about anything for too long. Today, he’s wearing a “Stand for the Flag” T-shirt and he’s selling historical musical instruments that he builds himself. They look familiar. Look at any blues music archive and you'll see a smiling black musician proudly holding a stringed instrument with a box (typically a cigar box), for a guitar body.

Rotten Roger and his Moon Pie diddley bow

"This is the poor people’s instrument,” Rodger says. “I'm carrying on the tradition.”

 He explains the history by saying the first ones were made with one string and a piece of wood, later modified with a broom stick and a cigar box. It was named a “diddley bow,” and may have been modeled after an African instrument. Early rock-and-roller Bo Diddley played a square-boxed electric guitar in the 50’s, supposedly learned to play on one. Some say he flipped the name of the instrument to use as his stage name. “Diddley bow” became “Bo Diddley.” At least that’s the story. A band member in Bo’s band later laughed at the idea, saying it came from the figure of speech, “diddley squat.”

Rodger visits a lot of churches and grade schools and says if kids can learn to count, they can learn a song in no time. Teaching kids music and music history is important to him.

“Kids learn by doing. I tell them, kids in the South used to string a wire on the house and play that string with a Coke bottle. I build them out of tin cans, bed pans, oilcans, hub caps and cast-iron skillets,” he says.

The diddley bows he was selling are made for the 21st century, with a piezo acoustic instrument pick-up, with a built-in electric cord jack for plugging into an amplifier. Hook up a distortion stomp box and the blues tones would be transformed from music on a front porch shotgun sharecropper’s shack to a smoky Texas bar, creating a growl that would make ZZ Top proud.

Instead of cat gut for a string, Rotten Rodger uses acoustic guitar strings, whether it is for the one-string diddley bow or the more evolved three-string version. He says these strings tune at a lower tensile strength than steel strings, so it doesn’t put as much pressure on the cigar box and neck connection.

The neck of the Moon Pie box version he was playing, was made from hard maple from old tables and shelving from the St. Louis Public Library. He says he bought $384-worth of Moon Pies just to get enough metal cans to make a series of Moon Pie box diddley bows. It’s a good fit. The blues were birthed near the Crossroads in Clarksdale, MS. in the South, and every country store stocked Chattanooga Bakery Moon Pies.

"Punch some holes in that tin and you've got a good resonator for a diddley bow," he noted.

Rotten Rodger is a craftsman and a good salesman. He knows humor warms up a customer prospect in an old school sort of way.

He knows the power of demonstration and a good story. But about the time you think he might fall into the class of medicine show salesman, he talks on a higher level about his craft, such as referring to his instrument as “diatonically threaded” in the way people referred to the atmosphere as “the ether.”

If you stick around long enough and he senses you really want to know the man beyond the sales pitches and no one’s at his demonstration space, he'll talk.

“At the age of 39, I was almost beaten to death in a train robbery in East St. Louis and spent the next ten years learning my name and how to walk, and lost all my music,” he shared.

This sounded believable and sad.

“I have short-term memory loss because of so much brain scarring, that last week is pretty much gone for me,” he said.

He was a train locomotive engineer and was out by himself one night in the train yard when someone jumped him.

“They beat me to death for $79 and a gold wedding band,” he said. “But today’s a gift from God,” he said, brightening up. "Good weather, friendly people and the cops aren’t after me—might be my night to buy a lottery ticket.”

There he goes again.

“Seven years ago, they invited me down to a steel mill in Granite City, IL, to teach cigar box guitar-making and the rest is history,” he explained. I teach cigar box, dulcimer, ukulele-build and stained glass, one day a week in an adult education program.

He gravitated towards the blues, because as he puts it, “the blues have more punch.”

“The blues kind of fit me,” he says.

An older husband and wife, probably in their late 70s, walk up to his space.

“Hi young lady, do you have your own band?” he asks. “That's not your bus driver?” he asks nodding to her husband. “I thought he drove the tour bus for you. Looks like he could carry some heavy equipment,” he joked.

She was admiring his diddley bow made from a metal lunch pail.

“Rumor has it that this is the actual lunch box used by Johnny Cash, as he smuggled a Cadillac, piece-by-piece, out of the Detroit plant where he was working,” he said, waiting for a response.

He refers to "One Piece at a Time," written by Wayne Kemp and recorded by Johnny Cash in 1976.

Sensing she doesn’t know that song and without hesitation, he plays the riff of “Folsom Prison Blues” and that got her attention.

He’s good. Really good.