Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions (14 page)

Soon after calling me and writing to me, Mrs. Frazier spent an afternoon with a lady who was a childhood neighbor and has been a lifelong friend. “After she was here awhile,” Mrs. Frazier wrote to me in a second letter,

I ask her if she remembered a Mrs. Hicks that lived on her Grandfathers farm. Her answer was Oh yes. On Sat. after our work was all done we kids all went to her house to hear her play the Dulcimer and sing and we would stamp our feet to the music. I said to her, they were so poor, where did get the Dulcimer. She said a Mr. Prichard made Dulcimers and when he found she could play it. He gave her one.

The road of discovery soon took a remarkable turn. Bolt's Fork is located in Lawrence County, Kentucky, a short distance west and south of Hun-tington. I have a friend named Lea Coryell, who is a Library of Congress librarian and is also a fine old-time banjo player. During my search for information on Prichard, I kept current on my findings. Lea searched for additional information in the Library of Congress.

Looking over the library's holdings of summaries of old census records for the area, Lea came upon a summary of the 1880 Census of Lawrence County, Kentucky, that had been compiled by a lady named Opal Mae Muncy in 1979. John W. Prichard, Golda Queen Frazier's grandfather and Charles N. Prichard's brother, was listed in the census, with his wife and children. The breathtaking information was contained in the entry for John's occupation. Ms. Muncy had transcribed it as “Dulemore Maker,” immediately followed by a question mark. Checking the microfilm rolls of the original census, Lea found that the census taker's handwriting was unclear at one point, but that the entry does in fact read either “dulcmore maker” or “dulemore maker.”

I called Mrs. Frazier and asked if her grandfather John had made dulcimers. She replied no. This, of course, simply means that she had not heard of any such activity on his part. The 1880 census was taken many years before Mrs. Frazier was born. Did the brothers work together? One might suppose that they did, with John and Charles both making instruments and Charles doing the selling.

This raises another series of interesting questions relating to dulcimer history. In 1871, a 21-year-old farmer named James Edward Thomas, who lived in Letcher County, Kentucky, some 75 roadless mountain miles south of Lawrence County, began to make dulcimers. We have already mentioned him and will tell his story in chapter 6. Did Thomas and either or both of the young Prichards ever meet? Whether they ever met or not, did Thomas see or know about the Prichard dulcimers? Or did John and/or Charles Prich-ard learn about dulcimers from seeing one of Thomas's? No one knows. This is another secret that the mountains will almost surely keep.

Now, let us change scenes. In June 1994, I sat on the porch of Ray and Rosa Hicks's house, on a slope of Beech Mountain near Banner Elk, North Carolina. Both passed away some years after I visited, and I feel fortunate to have met and known them. Ray had been born in the house and lived in it all his life. The house was built in 1914 by his father, Nathan Hicks (1896–1945), with lots of help from his neighbors, and is now the oldest house on Beech Mountain. A year before building the house, Nathan married his cousin, Rena. She was 13 years old.

By the standards of today's lifestyles, Ray, Rosa, and their son, Ted, who lived with them, had few needs. They grew vegetables on their mountainside land. The house was heated with wood-burning stoves, and Rosa did all the family cooking on a wood-burning cookstove. Ray and Ted chopped the wood, stacking it in large piles on the porch and near the house. There were some loose boards on the porch floor, but no one was disturbed by it—I was simply warned where not to place the little ladderback chair that was cheerfully brought out for me when I arrived unannounced. Arriving unannounced is the only way you could arrive. They had no phone.

Ray Hicks was a member of a western North Carolina family that has been supplying field collectors with folk songs and folklore for more than 70 years. Various family members were also makers and/or players of fretless banjos and dulcimers. A book about Ray and the Hicks family,
Ray Hicks: Master Storyteller of the Blue Ridge
by Robert Isbell, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1996. Much of the book is devoted to material secured during many hours spent with Ray, Rosa, and Ted.

Ray's father, Nathan, was a well-known North Carolina dulcimer maker and player. Figure 5.4 shows Nathan holding one of his dulcimers. The pattern of the dulcimer strongly resembles that of the dulcimers made by Charles N. Prichard in West Virginia. The dulcimer exhibits the long reverse curve of the body running from the head to the upper bulge or bout that is a major feature of Prichard's pattern; Allen Smith called it “sloping shoulders.” By contrast, old dulcimers from the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky, shown in figure 6.1 in the next chapter, have “broad shoulders”—that is, a short straight or convex line running from the head to the upper bout. This difference in body patterns is an important key to the geographical origins of old hourglass-shaped dulcimers.

Figure 5.4. Nathan Hicks holding one of his dulcimers. (Photographer unknown)

The West Virginia dulcimer pattern found its way into western North Carolina in the 1880s. Some old West Virginia dulcimers, other than those made by Prichard, share their “sloping shoulders” pattern with his instruments, but only Prichard is known to have made dulcimers in any quantity, and only his instruments achieved significant dissemination. It is an odds-on likelihood that the original dulcimer to enter the Beech Mountain area of North Carolina was made by Prichard.

According to local legend, the agent of transmission was a mysterious “Stranger from the West.” The name Millard Oliver, born in the area about 1873 and listed in the 1910 U.S. Census as living there, floats through some of the tales, either as the Stranger himself or as having some other unclear relationship to events, but no one really knows. I am grateful to Greg Gunner of Riga, Michigan, who has been patiently researching the records of the ancient and ramified mountain families involved and sending me copies of old records, for some of the information that appears below.

The most widespread version of the tale is the one that was related to me by Clifford Glenn, son of Leonard Glenn, both leading dulcimer makers of western North Carolina (see chapter 7). Leonard was the grandson and Clifford the great-grandson of Eli Presnell (1845–1939), shown in figure 5.5 with his wife, America.

According to the tale, the Stranger passed through the region on horseback about 1885 and stopped at the little Beech Mountain home of Eli and America, whom everyone called Americy, and their four-year-old son, Nineveh, known to all as Ninevey. The Stranger requested a night's lodging, and the kind mountain couple unhesitatingly offered it.

The traveler unpacked his horse, including a dulcimer that he was carrying. Eli Presnell, who had never seen or heard of dulcimers, was fascinated. As the Stranger sat together with the family that evening, it seems likely that he played it for them. With the Stranger's permission, Presnell examined the instrument and made a tracing of it.

Eli Presnell made at least one dulcimer from his tracing of the Stranger's instrument and may have made two or three. The instrument or instruments made by Presnell were the prototypes for the spread of dulcimer making throughout the Watauga area of western North Carolina. It is not clear which makers may have seen a dulcimer made by Presnell or one made by someone else, but the entire tradition reflects the design of instruments made by Charles N. Prichard of West Virginia.

Figure 5.5. Eli Presnell (1845–1937) and his wife, America (1844–1936), who offered a night's lodging to “the Stranger from the West” when he passed through the Beech Mountain area in 1885. (Courtesy Clifford and Maybelle Glenn)

According to reports, one person who may have owned a dulcimer made by Eli Presnell is a farmer named Roosevelt Presnell (1902–1992). Whether or not he owned a dulcimer made by Eli, Roosevelt himself made several instruments, none of which have survived. Roosevelt passed on his instrument-making skill and his design to his son, James Miles Presnell (1934– ), whose instrument making extended into the 21st century. Another maker was a man named Iris Presnell, Leonard Glenn's first cousin. Eli Presnell was their common grandfather.

Eli made a dulcimer for his son, Ninevey, which, according to one story, Ninevey used as a sled! Whether or not that is true, it is definitely true that Nineveh Presnell lived all his life in the house that had been owned by his parents, that he kept the dulcimer his father had made all his life, and that he often sat on his porch playing it. (See appendix E.) When the instrument needed repairs, Leonard Glenn fixed it and traced its pattern, which he and Clifford used for making their own dulcimers.

When Nineveh died in 1965 at age 83, the dulcimer passed to his granddaughter, Mrs. Ida Harmon of Boone. It is shown in figure 5.6. The pattern and measurements of this instrument do not perfectly duplicate those of Prichard's dulcimers, but they are close. Dulcimers made by Nathan Hicks and other members of the Hicks family in the Beech Mountain area also reflect the West Virginia/Eli Presnell “sloping shoulders” pattern. Measurements of all these instruments appear in appendix B, where they can be compared.

The progenitor of the Hicks mountain clan was David Hicks, dates of birth and death unknown, who moved to the Watauga River wilderness in what is now Watauga County, western North Carolina, before or during the Revolutionary War. The earliest written reference to him is in local tax records for 1778. David had two sons—Samuel, born in 1753, and David, born in 1756—and three daughters. David Jr. had 14 children; his family moved to Indiana in 1817. Samuel, known in family lore as “Big Sammy,” had five sons and four daughters. These children were the ancestors of today's western North Carolina Hicks families.

Figure 5.6. Dulcimer made by Eli Presnell in the 1880s, based on his tracing of the instrument carried by the Stranger from the West. The head is a replacement made by Leonard Glenn in the 1950s.

One of Big Sammy's sons was Samuel II or “Little Sammy,” born sometime between 1798 and 1800, date of death unknown. Little Sammy had four sons, two of whom were killed in the Civil War. One of the other sons, Andrew, had a son named Samuel, known as “Sammy III” (1848–1929).

With Sammy III's sons, we at last arrive at dulcimer makers. This generation became adults after the Stranger passed through and Eli Presnell had made one or more dulcimers. Two of these maker/players were John Benjamin “Ben” Hicks (1870–1945) and Roby Hicks (1882–1957). Their brother, James Brownlow (1872–1949), is also reported to have made one or more dulcimers, but no instruments survive.

In the late 1970s, researcher Lucy Long did extensive interviews with Hicks family members and other local people as part of her research for a Ph.D. thesis on the dulcimer in western North Carolina. The thesis is entitled “The Negotiation of Tradition: Collectors, Community, and the Appalachian Dulcimer in Beech Mountain, North Carolina.” Among the information that Long sought was anything that might shed light on the early history of the dulcimer in the area after Eli Presnell made his instruments. Long uncovered some old evidence regarding Roby Hicks and his wife, Buena Vista, known as “Buny.”