The champ defended his crown last week at our annual family reunion log contest. You may remember my comeback victory last year that involved me getting a crap load of stitches. I have to give credit to the the one and only One String Willie for inspiring my log idea. I used the instructions on his site to build a Diddly Bow out of a log and called it the Diddly Log. I wrote a song about the origins of the log contest and it’s a total rip off of the song below (he starts the song at 1:28 minutes in).
I don’t have any pictures of my award winning log, but my mom has a couple so I’ll post one later.
The Diddly Bow is a pretty cool instrument and easy as hell to play. From the all knowing Wikipedia:
The diddley bow is an American string instrument of African origin. It is typically homemade, consisting usually of a wooden board and a single wire string stretched between two screws, and played by plucking while varying the pitch with a metal or glass slide held in the other hand.
The diddley bow is significant to blues music in that many blues guitarists got their start playing it as children, as well as the fact that, like the slide guitar, it is played with a slide.
A notable performer of the instrument was the Mississippi blues musician Lonnie Pitchford, who used to demonstrate the instrument by stretching a wire between two nails hammered into the wood of a vertical beam making up part of the front porch of his home. Pitchford’s headstone, placed on his grave in 2000 by the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund, is actually designed with a playable diddley bow on the side as requested by Pitchford’s family. Other performers who use the instrument extensively are New York City-based jazz pianist Cooper-Moore, and American bluesman Seasick Steve.
Here are the lyrics to my song:
One day Anna gave Jake a ring
She said, “Hey Jake what can I bring?”
He said, “There’s only one thing for which I yearn:
That everybody brings their own logs to burn.”Anna said, “Jake, some logs I’ll bring,
but don’t you think that’s boring?”
She said, “I think I’ll make my log the best.”
And thus was born the log contest.Mary Kate and Theresa took first place,
They did the best at impressing Jake.
Next year Aunt Peggy won it all,
and last year it put me in the hospital.