Primal Slide
Guitar: Exploring the Limits of the Diddley Bow
As One String Willie, I make music on
the one-string diddley bow, beating out a rhythm on the single wire string, while changing its
pitch with a whiskey bottle slide. I am working to explore the limits of this primal instrument by moving beyond
traditional playing styles.
I invite you to turn off from the main musical highway by building your
own diddley bow and then teaching yourself to play it. I invite you to search out new musical paths or old ones that were
lost and all but forgotten. There are no "rules" for playing this instrument--you
can take the time to work out for yourself the different ways to make sounds come from a single string, and to integrate
these sounds into your own music. You will then have something that is satisfyingly and uniquely your own.
The diddley bow is of African-American origin, probably developed from instruments found
on the Ghana coast of west Africa. The diddley bow is rarely heard outside the rural south.
Other nicknames for this instrument include “jitterbug” or “one-string,” while an ethnomusicologist
would formally call it a “monochord zither.” The diddley bow has traditionally been considered an "entry-level"
instrument, normally played by adolescent boys, who then graduate to a "normal" guitar if they show promise on the
diddley bow. Many famous blues guitarists started out on a diddley bow, but because it was considered a children's
instrument, very few musicians continued to play the diddley bow once they reached adulthood. The diddley bow is therefore
not well represented in recordings. As of this writing, the commercially available recordings of traditional
diddley bow players might fill two CDs, but would not fill three.
With the information on this site, it is possible to build a perfectly good basic diddley bow in about
5 minutes if you have all the pieces and tools handy. A portable version is made from a board with an nail driven into
each end, a piece of steel wire stretched between the two nails and tensioned by slipping a small jar or bottle under the
string and pushing it as close to one of the nails as possible. A small scrap of wood is slipped under the string and
pushed as close to the other nail as possible. Traditionally, the string is struck in a rhythmic manner with a finger
or a stick or some other implement, and the pitch of the string is altered by using a slide made of glass, metal or some other
hard substance. A diddley bow is slide guitar stripped down to its most elemental level.