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The Orange County Register – Music Boxes – Photos and story by Paul Rodriguez. April 14, 2014
It sounds raw. It doesn’t sound like a nice guitar when you pick it up and strum it. It sounds different, unrefined.
“You’re talking about a stick with strings on it, and a box wrapped around a stick,” says Jason Farthing of his cigar box guitars. “Stick through a box, add strings, equals guitar.”
The cigar box guitar dates back about 150 years to the southern United States where people wanted to make music but didn’t have any…CLICK FOR FULL STORY
Jason Farthing is carrying a torch. He has become part of a more than 150 year-old tradition, albeit transplanted from America’s Deep South. An artist and a musician, Farthing creates and plays cigar box guitars.
His band, The Budrows, will be taking their 100% foot stompin’ cigar box rock ‘n’ roll to the stage today at the OC Fair and on Sunday, Aug. 12 at Fullerton’s Commonwealth Lounge.
For the uninitiated, cigar box guitars, which hail from an old folk tradition in the South, are homemade guitars assembled from a variety of local materials, the body being a discarded cigar box. “It’s a found object style,” Farthing says. In the composition of his instruments, the only parts that are intrinsically intended for a guitar are…CLICK FOR FULL STORY
Laguna Beach High School junior Macarena Rivera began playing “homemade music” with her stepdad, Jason Farthing, in the family’s living room about two years ago, in order to promote his cigar box art and guitar business and to help the performing arts student step outside of her comfort zone.
“After a while, I got less shy and we started singing cover songs together,” she said. “Eventually, I started writing my own lyrics and it turned into this really cool thing.”
That really cool thing, now a band called The Budrows (slang for “buds” or buddies), recently started spreading their Jefferson Airplane-meets-Janis Joplin bluesy sound around Orange County. Now returning from a gig in…CLICK FOR FULL STORY