TOO SICK CHARLIE — Madison’s One-Man Blues Machine
Key Points
- Too Sick Charlie, aka Dr. Eric Heiligenstein, is a one-man blues act known for his unique sound with a cigar box guitar.
- The cigar box guitar embodies the spirit of the blues, requiring raw musical honesty and creativity from its players.
- Charlie gained recognition by winning the Wisconsin Paramount Music Blues Challenge in 2021 and reaching the International Blues Challenge.
- He has become a well-respected figure in the Midwest festival circuit and the international cigar box guitar community.
- His music focuses on genuine expression rather than gear or genre, resonating deeply with audiences.
Cigar Box Blues
Pick up a cigar box guitar and you are holding the entire argument for why the blues exists. It is not an instrument in the conventional sense — no manufacturer’s warranty, no standardized frets, no instruction manual. It is a cigar box, a length of wood, a few strings, and a conviction that music does not require permission to happen.
Americans have been building them since the Civil War. Soldiers far from home fashioned something out of nothing because the need to play was stronger than the absence of a real guitar. That instinct — raw, stubborn, ingenious — is exactly what the blues was built on. In fact, it is exactly what Too Sick Charlie carries onto every stage he walks.
Progression of a Performer
Behind the stage name is Dr. Eric Heiligenstein, a retired UW-Madison psychiatrist who spent decades in clinical practice before the blues fully claimed him. He had played guitar much of his life, but bar gigs had always stayed just out of reach — secondhand smoke was a genuine barrier, not an excuse. Then Wisconsin passed its smoke-free indoor air law in 2010, and the equation changed. Around the same time, his girlfriend handed him a Christmas gift: a 3-string cigar box guitar. The instrument found him at precisely the right moment. This is often the way the best things always do.
The 3-string cigar box guitar, tuned to open G (G-D-G), is simultaneously a constraint and a liberation. With only three strings, you cannot hide behind complexity. You cannot run scales and call it feeling. The instrument demands slide playing, open resonance, and a kind of musical honesty that either you have or you don’t. Too Sick Charlie has it. His slide work coaxes a voice out of that box that sounds genuinely old — weathered, unhurried, rooted. Meanwhile, his harmonica fills the spaces between phrases with the kind of deep, aching tone that makes a room go quiet. Then the baritone comes in, conversational and warm as a back porch on a summer evening. Suddenly you are not in a Wisconsin festival tent. You are somewhere older and truer.
Awards & Recognition
In 2021, he won the Wisconsin Paramount Music Blues Challenge in the solo/duo category and earned a berth at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis. This event hosted one of roughly 260 acts competing across the Beale Street clubs and the Orpheum Theater. A retired psychiatrist from Madison, Wisconsin, alone on a Beale Street stage with a cigar box guitar and a harmonica. He was a quarterfinalist. It is one of those images the blues generates specifically to remind you what the music is actually about. It is not about gear, genre, or nostalgia — just the human being in front of the microphone with something to say.
Downtime
Back home, Too Sick Charlie has become a fixture on the Wisconsin and Midwest festival circuit — Waukesha, Mineral Point, Fitchrona, Oostburg — and a respected presence in the international cigar box guitar community, including festivals in Chicago and New Orleans. That community matters to him. The cigar box world is populated by players who understand that the instrument is a statement of intent. Consequently, you don’t pick up a three-string box because you want to impress anyone. You pick it up because you want to play, and the playing is the point.