Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions (15 page)

Roby and Buny were married when Roby was 15 and Buny was 13. Both said in independent interviews that when Buny was 11, 13-year-old Roby came courting, carrying a dulcimer, which he showed her how to play. This would have been around 1898–1899, about 15 years after the Stranger from the West passed through. Unfortunately, this instrument of Roby's youth has not survived, nor has any information about who might have made it.

The only dulcimer definitely made by Roby Hicks that I was able to locate was made in 1932. The instrument closely follows the Presnell/West Virginia “sloping shoulders” pattern.

Apart from the above information about Roby and Buena Vista Hicks, little is known about the history of the dulcimer in western North Carolina between the time that Eli Presnell made his first instrument and the 1930s. Leonard Glenn told me that a local man named Mac Presnell brought an old dulcimer to him many years ago to be repaired, but Mac is now deceased and the whereabouts of the dulcimer are unknown. Ray Hicks said in the early 1990s that, some 18 to 20 years previously, a member of the Farthing family, another large mountain clan, brought an hourglass-shaped dulcimer to him whose top and bottom were still joined by the end blocks but whose “hoops”—sides—were missing. The instrument had no sound holes. Ray's brother Floyd replaced the sides and cut heart-shaped sound holes in the top. Unfortunately, the owner of that instrument is also deceased, and the dulcimer has disappeared.

Roby Hicks's older brother Ben is another key figure, as much for who he taught and influenced as for his own work. The Hicks family genealogy,
The Hicks Families of Western North Carolina (Watauga River Lines)
, by John Henry Hicks, Mattie Hicks, and Barnabas B. Hicks, says, “Ben, as he was called, made a living by farming and gathering herbs. He was a talented woodworker and increased his income from the sale of wooden spoons, bowls, three-pronged toasting forks and dulcimers.”

Edd Presnell, a transitional dulcimer maker who will be described in chapter 7, married Nettie Hicks, who was Ben's daughter. Presnell told me that Ben Hicks made a number of dulcimers; Presnell's estimate at different times ranged from “a few” to “many.” The instrument shown in figure 5.7 is the only one that has thus far been recovered. It was made by Ben as a wedding present for Edd and Nettie, who were married in 1936.

The reverse curve from the head to the upper bout shows it to be one more progeny of the instrument carried by the Stranger from the West. But, in typical mountain fashion, Hicks has freely modified the old pattern, making it shorter, higher, and chunkier and eliminating the overlap of the top and bottom panels over the sides.

As a child in the 1920s, Nettie learned to play from her father, Ben, and she became one of the finest traditional players. Presnell himself learned to make dulcimers by copying the instrument made by Ben Hicks that is shown here.

Ben Hicks also had a son, Nathan, who was making dulcimers by the 1920s. It is not clear that he received his pattern from his father, however. His instruments closely resemble his Uncle Roby's 1932 dulcimer. In fact, Nathan and Roby often worked together, and at this remove in time it may not always be possible to know which of them made what.

Figure 5.7. Dulcimer made by Ben Hicks, no later than 1935. The pegs are replacements made by Edd Presnell.

There was no market for dulcimers in Nathan and Roby's world. However, in the late 1930s, word of Nathan's dulcimer-making was carried outside Appalachia by folk song collectors Maurice Matteson and Frank and Anne Warner. Nathan began to sell a moderate number of dulcimers to people in New York, and Roby joined him to create a little dulcimer enterprise. Nathan charged his customers $5 for the instruments. Roby made some and sold them to Nathan for $3, giving Nathan a $2 profit. Edd Presnell also made a few instruments for Nathan. Everybody was happy, including, undoubtedly, the customers.

A similar set of circumstances occurred later when Frank Profitt, who was Nathan Hicks's son-in-law, achieved national recognition as a folk-singer. Profitt, who had more orders for dulcimers than he could fill, commissioned Leonard Glenn to make some for him, which he sold as Profitt dulcimers. Such joint efforts appear to reflect a culture in which a good product was often seen as more important than the exact way in which it was produced or the person who produced it.

Once, Nathan shipped two dulcimers to New York buyers. Coy Rominger, the postal rider, carried them down the mountain by horseback in his mail sacks. When the instruments arrived in New York, both were broken and were returned by the customers. The post office paid Nathan $5 each for them, which was the amount for which they were insured. Roby went to work on the instruments and fixed them up as good as new. Once again the dulcimers journeyed down the mountain in Rominger's mail sacks. This time they arrived in New York intact, and the customers happily dispatched their checks!

Nathan Hicks loved both to make dulcimers and to play them. A number of pictures show him sitting on his porch or in family gatherings, with his dulcimer on his lap. Leonard Glenn told me that Hicks carried a dulcimer when he rode his horse. It was in a sack, probably hung from the saddle horn, according to Glenn. At anyone's request, and perhaps even without a request, Hicks would dismount, unlimber the dulcimer, sit down, talk, and play.

Ray Hicks told me that one time in the 1930s when there was no money at all in the house, Nathan took his dulcimer down to Banner Elk, sat down at an intersection in the middle of town, played his dulcimer, and sang. “One man stopped, and then another,” Ray said. Soon the crowd was blocking traffic and Nathan had a nice hatful of change. But the police were not amused. “They said they would let him go this time,” Ray said, “but they told him not to do it again!”

In 1936, Maurice Matteson, a folk song collector, published a small book entitled
Beech Mountain Folk-Songs and Ballads.
This book contains the words and music to 29 songs and ballads collected by Matteson in the Beech Mountain area of western North Carolina in 1933, eight of them contributed by Nathan Hicks. The frontispiece is a photo of Hicks holding one of his dulcimers.

Matteson was a classically trained singer and musician who taught music at the University of South Carolina. In 1932, he attended a summer music camp at Lees-McRae College in the Beech Mountain area. There he met a New Jersey high school music teacher named Mellinger Henry, who was a folk music enthusiast and had already collected the texts to many folk songs in the Beech Mountain area and elsewhere. Henry could not transcribe musical scores, however. In 1934, Henry published a book of the texts that he had collected, as
Songs Sung in the Southern Appalachians, Many of Them Illustrating Ballads in the Making
. The book included the words to 11 songs that Henry had collected from Rena Hicks.

Henry told Matteson that the Beech Mountain area was a gold mine of old songs. Intrigued, Matteson did a little scouting around and discovered that Henry was right. Matteson and Henry worked together to produce
Beech Mountain Folk-Songs and Ballads
, with Matteson preparing the musical score and Henry editing the texts.

Of Nathan Hicks's eight contributions, he provided the words for three of them, with another informant providing the tunes. For the other five, he provided both text and tune, playing his dulcimer. To the best of my knowledge, these are the earliest reliable transcriptions of traditional Appalachian dulcimer tunes that we possess. Hicks's eight contributions to
Beech Mountain Folk-Songs and Ballads
were:

1.   “George Colon,” a version of “George Collins,” Child Ballad No. 85. Text and tune from Nathan Hicks, July 31, 1933.
   
2.   “Florilla.” Text from Nathan Hicks, tune from Mrs. J. E. Schell, July 15, 1933.
   
3.   “Little Mohee.” Text from Nathan Hicks, tune from Edward Tufts, July 25, 1933.
   
4.   “The Rosewood Casket.” Text from Nathan Hicks, tune from Edward Tufts, July 25, 1933.
   
5.   “Groundhog.” Text and tune from Nathan Hicks, August 2, 1933.
   
6.   “A Wedding Song.” Text and tune from Nathan Hicks, August 5, 1933.
   
7.   “The Blue-Eyed Boy.” Text and tune from Nathan Hicks, August 5, 1933.
   
8.   “Broken Engagement.” Text and tune from Nathan Hicks, August 5, 1933.
   

By the time he finished
Beech Mountain Folk-Songs and Ballads
, Matteson had became strongly interested in both field-collecting of folk songs and concert performance of the material that he had collected. He used a Nathan Hicks dulcimer in his presentations. Matteson also interested Anne and Frank Warner in Hicks and his dulcimers. In her book
Traditional American Folk Songs from the Anne and Frank Warner Collection
, Anne Warner writes that, in 1938, shortly after she and Frank married, they were living on West 10th Street in New York.

In the spring of that year, through Ralph Fuller, a high school and college friend of Frank's, we met a professor from South Carolina, Maurice Mat-teson, who had just come to New York from a song-collecting trip in the southern mountains. He had brought back with him a dulcimer made by Nathan Hicks of Beech Mountain, North Carolina. . . . We wanted very much to have a dulcimer, so we wrote to Nathan Hicks to see if he would make one for us, which he did.

Ordering a dulcimer from Hicks led to the Warners' first trip to the Beech Mountain area to visit the Hicks family in July 1938. This, in turn, led to a lifelong friendship between the Warner and Hicks families, which is beautifully described in Anne's book, complete with quotations of letters from Nathan and songs learned from him, Rena, their son-in-law Frank Profitt, and others in the Beech Mountain area. The Warners sent a little financial help to the hard-pressed Hicks household when they could, plus bundles of old clothing at Christmastime. “It helped so much,” Rosa Hicks told me. Rena and Nathan responded by sending, every Christmas, a bunch of beautiful mountain greens and galax leaves.

Despite the difficulties and privations of mountain life, Nathan Hicks derived happiness from his dulcimers, his music, his marriage to Rena, and his children, but he struggled with personal problems that included a sense of failure. He worked as a farmer and laborer, at one point devising a scheme for selling oil from birch trees to companies that used it to make candy. After Hicks had devoted immense amounts of time and effort to the scheme, it failed when the courier who picked up the oil from him to sell to the company was discovered to be diluting it. The company immediately stopped all dealings with the courier, leaving Hicks without a customer.

Hicks's family continued to grow, but clothing and shoes were scarce and sometimes there was nothing to eat. A deeply conscientious man, Hicks was depressed by his inability to protect his family from want. As time passed, he sometimes exhibited bad temper and sometimes stayed away for a day or two at a time when there was no money and no food in the house. Rena, often ill from childbearing, child care, and privation, understood and did not complain, and the children understood, too.

Nathan Hicks was deeply attached to his father, Ben. When Ben died on February 7, 1945, Nathan's heart and spirit broke. On February 20, 1945, he committed suicide.

After I had been talking with Ray and Rosa Hicks for several hours on that June 1994 day, Rosa rose quietly, went into the house, and emerged with a child-sized dulcimer. Nathan, she said, had made it for Ray's young brother Jack, who was born in 1938. In 1952, Jack drowned in a swimming accident. The little dulcimer survives as a token of love between father and son.

Traditional dulcimers of the Cumberland Mountains are narrow-bodied, hourglass-shaped instruments of great beauty. In figure 6.1, dulcimer no. 18, made by Jethro Amburgey of Hindman, Kentucky, in 1929, hangs on the left. A Prichard dulcimer from West Virginia, made in the approximate period 1880–1900, hangs in the middle. By contrast with the West Virginia pattern, old-time dulcimers from Kentucky's Cumberlands are smaller and have “broad shoulders”—that is, the pattern moves out in a short, straight line or convex curve from the peg head to the upper bout. The sound holes are usually hearts. Because of the difference in the pattern, the upper sound holes are substantially closer to the peg head in the Cumberland pattern than in the West Virginia pattern.