The Diddley Thing

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It had fascinated me, yet I couldn’t remember its name. It makes music out of nothing. “It’s a diddley wiggly thing.” I tried to remember what it had been called but my memory failed me -again.

Years ago, we had stopped by at a local Piggly Wiggly, because the name of the store had made me laugh. The shop inside, unclean and rather dark, had stopped the giggle soon. The name however I never forgot and now it blocked the memory of the instrument I wanted to tell my husband about.

I had just seen it a few hours earlier in the morning. On my daily quest for a 5-minute laugh, I had stumbled over it.

In the evening I turned on the TV, streamed YouTube, and searched for something similar. It had been a blues song. “Diddley Blues,” I wrote in the search and sure enough, there it was.

It’s a Diddley bow. A one-sting music instrument, often made out of a banister piece and a cigar box. Brilliant in its simplicity.

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People always found a way to make music, and when they didn’t have access to the instruments they needed, they invented their own versions. Cheaper, simpler, but in the end working just the same.

A Diddley bow, functioning like an acoustic guitar, at least that’s the way I see and hear it. A one-stringed African guitar, popular in the Mississippi Delta region.

A quick research taught me the following:

Origins. The diddley bow derives from instruments used in West Africa. There, they were often played by children, one beating the string with sticks and the other changing the pitch by moving a slide up and down. The instrument was then developed as a children’s toy by slaves in the United States.

The diddley bow is a single-stringed instrument from the African-American communities of the Mississippi Delta. Easily made from found materials on rural farms, the diddley bow played an important role in the evolution of the Delta blues in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Here is the piece I stumbled upon first:

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Later on, I found this treasure.

Impressive, isn’t it?