The tea chest bass ?
Its a tea chest once used for carrying tea on the high seas that ship farers used as a resonator to make sounds first hitting the box (case, chest,) to make rhythmical sounds to entertain. A string or rope was then used to stimulate the tea chest to cause a bass sound that would accompany singing and many other instruments, this culture expanded around the ports of the world, it would probably have been discovered by any body bored and inquisitive when the seas were calm and the ships were going nowhere.
The tea-chest bass, is a stringed instrument used in British folk music that uses a wooden tea chest as a resonator and a single string, the pitch is adjusted by pulling on a staff or stick to change the tension of the string. In the 1950s, English and German skiffle bands and Australlian and New Zealand bush bands used a tea-chest bass, before the Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney's band, The Quarrymen, featured a tea-chest bass, as did many young bands around 1956.
In America the tea-chest bass was used in jug bands first known as "spasm bands," that originated among African-Americans around 1900 in New Orleans and reached a height of popularity between 1925 and 1935 in Memphis and Louisville. When tea chests became rare folk musicians in jug band-influenced music used a washtub as a resonator often accompanied by a washboard as a percussion instrument.
At about the same time, European-Americans of Appalachia were using the instrument in "old-timey" folk music. A musical style known as "gut-bucket blues" came out of the jug band scene, and was cited by Sam Phillips of Sun Records as the type of music he was seeking when he first recorded Elvis Presley. A folk music revival in the U.S. in the early 1960s re-ignited interest in the one string bass and jug band-inflenced music. Bands included Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions which later became The Grateful Dead and Joe MacDonald (Country Joe) notes that Country Joe and the Fish began as a folk-rock trio featuring a washtub inbindi bass.
The earliest records trace the origins of the instrument to the "ground harp" or "ground zither" - a version that uses a piece of bark or an animal skin stretched over a hole in the ground or pit this was held down by rocks and stones used snd as a resonator then a vine attached to a tree and stretched then beaten with sticks by upto ten people. The ang-bindi made by the Baka people of the Congo is but one example of this instrument found among tribal societies in Africa and Southeast Asia, and it lends its name to the generic term inbindi for all related instruments that changes note by tensioning the string to its resonator.
Evolution of design, including the use of more portable resonators, has led to many variations on the basic design found around the world, particularly in the choice of resonators. As a result there are many different names for the instrument including the "tank bass","barrel bass","case bass","box bass" (Trinidad), "bush bass" (Australia and New Zealand) , "babatoni" (South Africa), "tingotalango" (Cuba), "tulan" (Italy), dan bau (Vietnam) gopichand (India), "acuestick" bass and others.
Fletcher & Rossing's The Physics of Musical Instruments, sates that if the string of an instrument pulls up from the soundboard at 90 degrees (i.e. perpendicular) like a harp or inbindis, then the pitch you hear is not the vibrating frequency of the string, but rather twice that frequency! Vibration of the head is generated by change in string length (twice per cycle) rather than by movement of the string in its plane of vibration.
gosh