Front Porch essay for the Built/Unbuilt issue.

Many Mississippi blues musicians — among them, Elmore James, Eddie Cusic, Big Jack Johnson, Lonnie Pitchford, and Napoleon Strickland— began their musical careers by learning as children to play a one-stringed homemade instrument sometimes called a diddley-bow.

I was in second grade in Kentucky when my friend Bobby invited me to spend Friday night with him and go fish a farm pond the next morning. His father, a long haul truck driver, was off work for the weekend and drove us some thirty miles out of town where we baited simple bream hooks with red worms and carefully watched our white and red bobbers, in youthful hope of success.