mike huels
Vendor
I live in Little Rock, AR. I have been a high school teacher for 23 years. I am also a musician who plays the harmonica and washboard. I started creating musical/art washboards as a hobby. Friends started asking me to make them a custom washboard to hang as art, and that's how I started my business.
How’d I come about making art as an instrument? Like most Gen X’ers I saw old black and white movies that often had either white hillbillies or black jug/ragtime bands in a scene playing a washboard. I would not come across one in reality until I went to my first music festival in 1993 on the Mulberry River in Arkansas called the Booger County Boogie. Ted Smith played one in Shindig Shop. They didn’t play “buttoned-up” traditional bluegrass—they played a high-energy, rowdy style often called “Ozark Stomp.” I remember watching them leave the stage and walk around the crowd with the washboard leading the jam.
The second time I came across a washboard was in 1994 at a Phish show. The band would come up to the front of the stage and sing acapella with John Fishman playing a washboard to the Boston song “Long Time.” My next experience was a street musician on Decatur Street in the French Quarter. Then I came across a band named My Tea Kind. Their front woman, Bonnie Paine, played a washboard and had a beautiful voice. Those silk gloves with thimbles are fire.
Huels Custom Washboards are handmade one screw, one bolt, one board at a time by myself alone. Every board is a work of art as well as an instrument. No mass production. The majority of boards are vintage (50’s, 60’s, 70’s) and found at flea markets. The attachments (traps) range from store bought, garage sale, Goodwill finds, and from any junk piles I come across.
Each Washboard is custom made with a combination of new and old attachments. The boards are built durably, and can actually be played. They are Americana Art that looks great on any wall. If the boards could talk, oh the stories they could tell. Some boards intentionally are not decorated to show their original brand, while others have deep wear and tear showing use through multiple generations. Some images are created and edited with A.I.
Michael Huels
