| Bud Sheeks with just one of his many handmade musical instruments. (Photo: J.D. Pooley/Sentinel-Tribune) |
Bud Sheeks gets his best ideas at 2 in the morning.
After that there’s no sleeping.
"He goes out in the garage and starts making something out of it," says wife Leona of her
husband’s latest garage sale or Goodwill store treasure.
Usually the "something" is a stringed musical instrument. Most of the instruments are even
playable, although we’re definitely not talking Stradivarius violins here.
"I don’t try to do finished stuff. Hillbillies don’t do finished stuff!" he said, pointing to
one of his recent creations, a three-string tennis racket banjo on which he used eyebolts for tuning
keys.
Sheeks, a Paulding County native who lived in Hoytville for many years before moving to Bowling Green
when he wed Leona nine years ago, is a mild-mannered excavator by day.
He was a steel welder at Daybrook for 19 years, before the company closed and he got laid off. After that
he bought a ditching machine and for the past 40 years he’s been the owner of Sheeks Excavating.
But laying tiles in one or another area farmer’s fields doesn’t sufficiently exhaust his creative juices.
Last winter, while he "couldn’t be out in the field or nothing," inspiration struck when Sheeks
saw someone on the Internet building instruments for jug bands.
"They put a pacemaker and defibrillator in me" a few years ago, "and you can’t weld with
that" so Sheeks "bought a bunch of saws from a friend’s garage sale" and started adapting
woodworking skills to musical-instrument making.
His first attempt involved turning a cigar-box into a guitar.
Then there was the xylophone made out of a metal rack from the inside of an old refrigerator.
Sheeks saw on YouTube "somebody made a Chinese zither. It showed Chinese girls playing one. But it
didn’t show how to make it." To get the instructions you had to send $50 to somebody.
Sheeks decided he could wing it and his zither is one of his favorite instruments.
Now he’s churning out new instruments at the rate of more than one a week and one entire bedroom of the
couple’s ranch home is filled to the gills.
"I have no idea how many’s in there," he admitted, pointing vaguely behind the door where more
are hidden.
He’s got a pipe drum made from 50 feet of two-inch pipe. His steel guitar started life as a tabletop
ironing board. There are banjos, guitars and mandolins made out of skis, crutches, frying pans, coffee
cans, cookie tins and a host of decorative metal trays including one shaped like a lobster and another
like a heart.
He’s produced so many that friends and neighbors now wait with baited breath to see what he will come up
with next.
"People bring me things and see what I’ll make with it."
Part of the fun is in seeing how little money he actually has to spend on his hobby.
He gets his metal guitar and banjo strings by buying clothesline rope from Wal-Mart – 150 feet for $3.95
– and stripping off the plastic coating to access the triple wire inside.
The Sheekses frequently host musical jam sessions for 15, 20 or more friends in their home, where Sheeks
usually chooses to play his "gut bucket" – a single-string plucked instrument with a foot
pedal attached to a metal drum. He sings his own accompaniment in a mellow bass.
Twice a week he heads down to Melrose in Paulding County for organized jam sessions held at an old
schoolhouse. Another night of the week he’s jamming in Ottawa in nearby Putnam County.
His personal musical preference is for old-style country; Hank Williams Sr., Lloyd Snow, Charlie Pride,
Web Pierce and Tex Ritter are favorites.
"The band always asks me, what have I got out of the cemetery today?" he said with an
unapologetic smile.
He’s quite willing to play Elvis – but only the gospel songs, and doesn’t mind slipping in a little Ray
Stevens humor at the right moment.
Leona teases her husband about taking over the house with his instruments, but she’s probably his biggest
fan and when they host those jam sessions at home she makes sure nobody goes away hungry. The couple,
each with four grown children, were both widowed, having lost their spouses to heart disease, when they
got together.
