Mike Snowden

Mike Snowden is a guitarist, singer-songwriter, and cigar box guitar craftsman. He is a leading figure in the recent resurgence of interest in cigar box guitars.

Mike Snowden was born on January 1, 1970, in Lafayette, Louisiana. He grew up in Natchitoches, Louisiana, where his first guitar was a yellow toy plastic one with plastic strings from Sears Roebuck. He was the bassist in several bands as a teenager and was mentored by three older accomplished Natchitoches musicians—Donnie Hyams, Sammy Nix, and David Dollar—who expanded his musical horizons beyond heavy metal and recruited him to play bass with them when they performed in local bars. In 1989 shortly after graduating from high school he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to pursue a career in music.

Following several false starts, he was drafted to play bass in Band de Soleil with Michelle Malone (guitar, vocals) and Danny Begay (drums). He travelled extensively with the band up and down the eastern seaboard and throughout the Midwest. Band de Soleil often headlined but also opened for a number of bands, including Indigo Girls, Joe Cocker, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, the Dave Matthews Band, and others. He was with Band de Soleil from 1992 until 1996, when the band broke up. After several years of almost constant touring, Snowden was exhausted and opted to take a break to spend time with his family and to decide what his next move would be musically.

After seeing a video on the Internet of someone playing a cigar box guitar, he was intrigued. He did research into the origins of cigar box guitars and how they were constructed. He built one for himself and then fashioned one for a friend. In 2007 he began handcrafting three- and four-string cigar box guitars using exotic hard woods for the necks and selling them at arts and crafts shows and from his Internet website. To date he has handcrafted close to 1,400 guitars. His customers are spread across the globe and include such well-known musicians and celebrities as Kristian Bush of Sugarland who purchased several, actor and musician Jeff Daniels, who purchased four of Snowden’s guitars when he was in Atlanta filming Dumb and Dumber To, Joe Perry of Aerosmith, comedian Anita Renfroe, and Ozzy Osbourne.

In 2009 Snowden composed and recorded “Summer in the Fields—Cigar Box Guitar Instrumentals,” his first album of cigar box guitar music performed on the instruments he had built. He has put out four additional albums of original cigar box guitar music, along with a sampler of songs from his five albums; a sixth album is in the works. His CDs were produced by Jason LaFarge of Seizures Palace Recording in Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Tom Tapley of The Projector Room in Decatur, Georgia.

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