New Music: Bear Ryan's "Mississippi Mornings"
The cigar box guitarist takes you to American Gothic's crossroads
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New Music: Bear Ryan
Single, “Mississippi Mornings” (swampy delta blues)
This is the second single from Bear Ryan’s upcoming LP Low & Slow releasing February 17, 2026. Backed by The Delta Snakes, “Mississippi Mornings” is a stripped down delta blues tune that belies her usual swamp rock and Texas outlaw influences. Though she assures fans that the LP delivers a pace that will rattle your snake cage a bit. Bear’s live video performance of the LP’s first single “I Am The Weather” at Austin’s acclaimed Saxon Pub showcases Bear’s high energy, boot-tappin’ signature sound. See the video below. 👇🏻
I’ve closely followed Bear’s social posts sampling snippets of the LP’s recording sessions scheduled between her Clarksdale barbershop shifts. You know, the place where locals gather and casually pull out an instrument between stories to strum through the thick Mississippi morning air… exchanging nods as a #2 clipper buzzes along with the ever-present cicada choir. The traditional hub of neighborhood culture dating back to the blues’ infancy. Bear Ryan ditched the Austin, Texas manic music hustle to live and wax poetic in Clarksdale. It was a stroke of creative enrichment if her new music is the litmus test.
Bear’s band The Delta Snakes are guitarist and partner Ryan Robertson, guitarist Guitar Frenchie, and drummer “BE.” Robertson is Delta Avenue Guitars’ luthier who builds Bear’s stringed instruments, with a heavy emphasis on cigar box guitars.
Cigar boxes are packaging popularized by need in 1862 due to a U.S. government excise tax on tobacco that required stamped and sealed boxes to prove a retailer paid the required fee. Professionally constructed instruments were far too expensive for musicians (especially Black artists) at the time, so ingenuity resulted in repurposing these “trash” cedar boxes for guitars, banjos, ukeleles, and violins. Here’s a more detailed history if you’d like to take a deep dive.
When you look up cigar box guitar legends, listings don’t include women, as referenced here, but consistently list Blind Willie Johnson, Bo Diddley, and Lightning Hopkins as pioneers. If Google search results are any indication, the most recognized female cigar box guitarist is Kansas City native Samantha Fish who started playing one publicly in ~2012. That’s a lot of cigar box guitar history with little public female recognition. There must be more who deserve credit. If you know of female pioneers from the 19th and 20th centuries, leave their names and helpful links/videos in the comments so I can update this post!
Back to “Mississippi Mornings” and why Bear’s stylistic adaptation is more relevant than meets the ear. Bear’s cigar box guitar picking and steady yet cutting vocals drop you squarely into the deep south’s spiritual crossroads. Her contemplative yet simple lyrics dusted in struggles of reconciling inner demons, desires, generational traditions, and God’s undisclosed game plan. The stripped down production mirrors modern American Gothic and southern pop culture spiritual phenoms like the award-winning 2025 horror movie Sinners (which raked in over 60 award nominations), my own guilty pleasure series “Supernatural” that ran for 15 seasons on The WB, and 2021’s creepy Netflix mini-series “Midnight Mass.”
Akin to these themes, Americans nationwide now find ourselves in a real-world American Gothic reckoning. Forcing our collective hands to stand strong and face the wind, or timidly spectate from the sidelines, or get the hell outta Dodge. No matter your choice, forces at work will incite social and spiritual upheaval.
So, what’s a woman to do when dawn brings the taxman, temptation, guilt, oppression, or a sense of nothing left to lose? When you’re in the “buckle of the Bible Belt” with a monkey on your back, you may just haul ass before the sun rises. With your cigar box guitar locked and loaded in the backseat.
Just announced: “Mississippi Mornings” landed Bear Ryan 2nd place in the New Orleans International Cigar Box Guitar Playoffs. Here is a link to her submission video.
Visit BearRyanMusic.com for upcoming show dates and music sales.
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Thea 🎶
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Thx for sharing @Sintija Brence !
Pls remember to leave names for women who pioneered cigar box guitar playing. I'm happy to add it to the issue!