the.com/cigar box guitar

means A homemade stringed instrument built from a cigar box as the resonating body, a wooden neck, and typically three or six strings — a folk-built cousin of the guitar.

from Rooted in American improvisation, especially among poor and Black communities in the late 1800s and early 1900s South, who repurposed empty cigar boxes — cheap, plentiful, and resonant — into makeshift instruments when real guitars were unaffordable. The tradition likely drew on even older diddley-bow and one-string folk instrument practices, and it resurfaced visibly during the Great Depression when necessity again outpaced wallets. The name is simply literal: the box the cigars came in, strung and fretted into something that could sing.