Before winning the chance to compete in January at the upcoming International Blues Competition in Memphis, there were cigar boxes made into guitars. These homemade instruments, a staple of the American blues canon, were how Casey “The Cigar Box Kid” Baron earned his nom de guerre.
“Around 2008 my brother got a guitar for Christmas, and I was so interested in it, my parents gave me one a few weeks later,” said Baron, a 24-year-old Great Neck native. A few years of lessons taught him the foundations of playing guitar, but the niche that held his attention was something he discovered a little farther down the YouTube rabbit hole.
Through video tutorials on various finger techniques, he found himself deep in a corner of the internet dedicated to blues and folk music. He became particularly fascinated with the construction of stringed instruments from cigar boxes. Guitars are expensive, after all, especially during the Great Depression, when both homemade instruments and the general blues sentiment had their heyday.
The first guitar the young Baron built was with his father at the age of 10. At its simplest, Baron says, a cigar-box guitar can be made from just the box and not a whole lot else. “You put a couple tuners on the end of a one-by-two [board] and string it up. Three strings, maybe four. You don’t even need frets, you can just play it with a slide.” This first guitar and the discovery of the slide marked the event horizon for Baron’s love of the blues. After that, there was no turning back.
In 2013, Baron’s aunt introduced him to Michael Clark, then the owner of Crossroads Music in Amagansett. Clark took an immediate interest in the young musician’s work and offered to try to sell some of the cigar box guitars in-store. But either by sheer coincidence or ordained by fate, depending on your inclination, Kerry Kearney, a guitarist and member of the New York Blues Hall of Fame, was in Crossroads that very day to teach a blues workshop, and he and Baron hit it off. On the spot, Kearney invited the young musician to open a show for him just one week later, and a performing career was born.
Clark fondly remembers Baron’s prodigious talents as both a bluesman and a luthier. “He is a fine craftsman. But when I first heard him demonstrate, I was blown away. He was really good,” Clark recalled. “[Baron] is a flat-out, old-school blues guy in my book. A great finger-picker with a voice that complements his style. He is way beyond his years.”
Crossroads began stocking and selling young Casey’s homemade instruments and, in 2014 — 20 cigar-box guitars later — Baron found himself itching to expand his horizons. “I started getting really into the idea of making a solid-body electric guitar,” he said. “It was a natural extension of my talents. There’s a lot of crossover between cigar-box guitars and solid-body electrics, except you have a lot more room to maneuver with the latter.” The jump in skill required is formidable, though. There’s circuitry to lay down, wires to strip and solder, and a higher degree of precision required when making the neck and the body.
“It took quite a bit of trial and error,” Baron said. “I think I must’ve made, like, three or four different necks, and a couple of bodies before I finally got it the way I wanted it to be. This first solid-body took me close to half a year to finish.” His study of the craft only intensified from there, including a week long workshop across the pond in Dorset, England, under the oversight of Crimson Guitars. He continued to play the blues, of course, but took a hiatus from competitions during these years in order to focus on building instruments.
When the time came to think about college, Baron first considered studying to be a math teacher but realized that he was more interested in the math itself than the educational aspect. “I had a couple of interests: I liked math, I liked building guitars, and learning about the universe, especially deep space. The answer was mechanical engineering.”
This was a natural choice for a mathematics enthusiast and the skilled luthier Baron had become. First and foremost, he had the manual dexterity down cold. Second, mechanical engineering lay at the confluence of his three interests: “A mechanical engineer can design and build things, by hand, that will go into space. It was an easy choice.”
Now in his last semester of undergraduate work at the New York Institute of Technology, Baron has carried on his guitar-building. He has also picked up the mic once more, having returned to live performances earlier last year. One of his most notable showings was as a solo act at the Long Island Blues Society’s regional competition, which he went on to win. This was his qualifier for the International Blues Foundation’s 2025 competition, an event that he’ll be competing in this coming January.
Despite his varied interests, international successes, and a veritable mountain of mechanical engineering coursework, Baron’s roots on the East End still pull strong.
“When Kerry’s band is playing, I’ll come sit in for a few songs,” he says. “My favorite thing to play, though, is a duet. There’s something about the way I play music that’s more suited to small groups than solo work.” After all, even though he isn’t the same man he was when he walked into Crossroads Music that day in 2013, there’s nothing quite like the site of your first performance.
