Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions (19 page)

Edna Ritchie was one of the teachers at the school. Her sister Jean—author of
The Dulcimer Book
—came for a visit just before going to New York, where her arrival stirred up immediate interest in dulcimers. Bob Hart, manager of a handicraft shop in New York that was affiliated with the Southern Highlanders Handicraft Guild, sent a letter to the Campbell Folk School, ordering two dulcimers for the shop. Ledford was known to have made a fiddle, so the job passed to him. Using an Amburgey dulcimer as his pattern, he made the two instruments.

“They paid me $20 apiece!” Ledford chortled as we talked about it more than 40 years later. “I was making no money at all. I was rich!”

That was only the beginning. People who were at the school taking short courses saw the dulcimers while they were being made and before they were shipped. They ordered a total of eight more. Figure 7.1 shows Ledford holding his dulcimer no. 3, which was one of those eight. It is made of black walnut and butternut, which mountain people called “white walnut.” The dulcimer has the narrow body and small staple frets of the old Cumberland design. Some four decades later, the owner shipped it back to Ledford, saying that he should rightfully have it and refusing Ledford's delighted offer to pay.

Figure 7.1. Homer Ledford in 1992, holding his dulcimer no. 3, made in 1948.

In 1949, Ledford entered Berea College. Berea students, most of whom are drawn from the mountains, must work to pay for part of the costs of their education. Ledford made instruments, which the school sold. At Berea, he also learned to make mandolins and guitars. He then transferred to Eastern Kentucky University, graduating in 1954.

He continued to make dulcimers and made changes to the old Thomas-Amburgey pattern. Ledford broadened the body, widened the fretboard, and shortened the vibrating string length from 28 inches to 26½ inches (see figure 6.1). He laid out the fret pattern of each instrument by ear. “I made a little fret out of a wire that came all the way across and bent down the side, that I could slide under the strings,” he explained. “A movable fret, same size as the wire I was going to use for a fret. And I moved it along and I strummed the string until it would sound perfect, and then I'd mark it.” As we will see, Edd Presnell of Banner Elk, North Carolina, did the same thing, and many other old-time makers undoubtedly used this method.

Ledford tuned his instruments C-G-G, that is, Ionian in the key of C. “This is the way that Edna told me to tune,” he says. C-G-G was a traditional Cumberland tuning, although the strings sound brighter if brought up to D-A-A, a usual tuning today. Perhaps C-G-G was used because it caused the instrument's major tuning to correspond with the major scale in the key of C on the piano. Ledford also learned about Dorian and Mix-olydian tunings from Jean and Edna Ritchie when he was at Berea.

He continued to use staple-style frets for 15 years or more after Berea. However, Ledford is a guitar player, and he wanted to fret both the melody and the middle string with his fingers instead of playing with a noter. This is the reason that he widened the fretboard. He extended the frets under both the melody and middle strings and also extended the third fret under all three strings, “so I could get a G-seventh chord.” The frets continued to be of the wire staple type until the 1970s, when he finally adopted modern instrument frets running under all the strings.

The shape of the peg box was modified “to make it flow more,” and he also tapered the head. Ledford changed the sound holes from hearts to diamonds. He wanted to be different, he says—and, he adds, diamond-shaped sound holes are easier to cut. “I made a chisel, a very, very thin chisel, that you could push four times and cut that sound hole.” By the late 1960s, however, he yielded to the wishes of many of his customers and switched back to hearts.

An interesting feature of Ledford's redesign relates to his use of four strings. Old Cumberland dulcimers—without exception, as far as I know—have three. These days, a paired melody string is common, to make the melody more audible over the two drones. Ledford believed that he was responsible for this innovation of the folk revival, but it came about in an indirect way.

About 1960, he paired his middle string. The reason related to his method of play, in which he fingered both melody and middle strings. Today, Ledford dulcimers of this era, with staple frets running under two of the strings except the long one at the third fret, a doubled middle string, and diamond-shaped sound holes, sometimes turn up on eBay and go for high prices. They constitute living history of the transition from old to new, and collectors know it.

It was Edna Ritchie's husband, Floyd, who urged Ledford to take the next step. Ledford made a dulcimer for Floyd's birthday. Floyd, however, played only with a noter. A doubled middle string, which added one more string to an already strong drone, was a net liability. Floyd dropped by to see Ledford.

“How would it be, Brother Ledford,” Floyd asked, “if we put that string on the outside where I could push it with my noter?”

“Well, no problem, Floyd,” Ledford replied.

“I didn't know what I was doing,” Ledford reminisced, “but I put it out there, all right. Now, Floyd and Edna were going around all over the country giving concerts. They went to the National Folk Festival, went to fairs, went to all these places, and people saw that doubled melody string, and it caught on. Then people came to me and asked how come
my
double string's in the middle. I said, ‘That's where I started it!'”

After college, Ledford taught school in Louisville in 1955, then left and taught for nine more years in Winchester, Kentucky. Finally, the balance tipped to the point at which he could earn more money by making instruments than by teaching. He turned to instrument making full-time and was an instrument maker from then on. At the time of his passing at age 79 on December 11, 2006, he had made more than 6,000 dulcimers, along with numerous banjos, fiddles, guitars, and other instruments.

In addition to being a dulcimer maker, Ledford was an accomplished bluegrass musician, playing with a group called the Cabin Creek Band. He also published a book of autobiographical tales and poems, entitled
See Ya Further up the Creek.
At the time of his death, arrangements were in place for him to receive an honorary doctorate of humanities degree from Eastern Kentucky University. Shortly after his passing, he was posthumously awarded the degree.

The long reverse curve from the head to the upper bout that is a major feature of the dulcimers made by Charles N. Prichard of Huntington, West Virginia, was passed down into North Carolina dulcimers through two tracings, one done by Eli Presnell in 1885 and the other by Leonard Glenn in the 1950s. The latter tracing brought the pattern into the folk revival.

Figure 7.2. Leonard Glenn
(left)
and his son, Clifford, in the 1960s. (Courtesy Clifford Glenn)

Nathan and Roby Hicks's dulcimer-making did not produce a direct legacy. The individuals in the Beech Mountain area who bridged the gap from the old to the new were Leonard Glenn and his son Clifford, both of Sugar Grove, North Carolina (see figure 7.2).

Leonard, the son of Nathaniel (“Nat”) and Kimmey Glenn, was born in Watauga County on December 5, 1910, and lived there all his life, until his death on April 3, 1997. The Glenns lived about a mile up Rush Branch Road, a gravel road in the vicinity of Beech Mountain. Leonard's grandfather on his mother's side was Eli Presnell, who received the Stranger from the West in 1885 and traced his dulcimer (see chapter 5).

Nat Glenn made fretless banjos and one dulcimer. The latter, which would be of immense historical interest, apparently no longer exists. “It was destroyed in some fashion,” Leonard said.

On December 22, 1934, Leonard Glenn married Clara Ward, who, Leonard said, “was raised just down the dirt road from me!” Their son and only child, Clifford, was born on December 29, 1935.

Leonard bought a tract of mountainside land from Clara's father, Robey Monroe Ward, for $20 an acre, paying it off over a period of time. He kept a horse and two cows and tilled the fields, raising beans, corn, potatoes, and tobacco. He was also an excellent carpenter and possessed many other skills, which he put to good use. As a Works Progress Administration worker during the Great Depression, Leonard helped to build the foundation of Cove Creek Elementary School. He worked at a sawmill on the Watauga River and at a water-powered sawmill and grain mill at Laurel Creek Falls.

In 1936–1937, Leonard and his father-in-law built a small house on the land that Leonard had purchased from Ward. Leonard and Clara lived in it for the rest of his lifetime. (At this writing in 2009, Clara, in her 90s, lives in a nursing home.) The house existed for many years before any car reached it. Shortly after Clifford and Maybelle Presnell were married on June 17, 1964, Leonard, his brother Howard, and Clifford built the newly-weds a small house about 20 yards from Leonard and Clara's home.

Leonard and Clifford Glenn began to make banjos and dulcimers in the 1950s. They made more dulcimers than banjos, principally because of the difficulty of procuring a sufficient number of skins of small animals such as squirrels for banjo heads. In later years, they discovered that they could buy calfskin at music stores, and this was substituted for squirrel hides. Later, they adopted imported skins of Mexican goats, which are cheaper.

The Glenns' first dulcimers were single-bout style, rather than the hourglass shape that was already traditional to western North Carolina. “I think I must have made it up,” Leonard said, “although I might have seen one. I didn't have a pattern to go by.” Leonard's first dulcimer was purchased by neighbor Ray Farthing. Clifford's was bought by folklorist John Putnam, who paid $20. Clifford was about 19 when he made it. “I said to myself, ‘It's the first, and it'll be the last!'” Clifford recalls. Fortunately, he changed his mind.

In the 1950s, the legacy of the Stranger from the West once more asserted itself. The head of Nineveh Presnell's dulcimer broke, and Nineveh, who was Leonard's maternal uncle, brought the instrument to Leonard and asked if he could replace the head, which Leonard did. While in possession of the instrument, however, he also took the opportunity to trace its pattern. Leonard and Clifford soon began to make dulcimers in the Stranger's pattern. History had repeated itself.

Subsequently, in response to the requests of some customers for Kentucky-style instruments, the Glenns also adopted Homer Ledford's pattern and added it to their offerings.

A third pattern that was used by Leonard Glenn for a period of time in the 1960s is illustrated by the middle instrument in figure 7.3. Lewis Hicks, one of Nathan Hicks's sons, brought a Nathan Hicks dulcimer to Leonard and asked him to make a couple of instruments from the pattern to give to members of his family. The pattern of this dulcimer featured a larger upper bout than Eli Presnell's dulcimer, as well as a slight reverse curve running from the lower bout to the foot.

At about this time, as previously noted, Leonard agreed to make some dulcimers for the old-time folksinger and instrument maker Frank Profitt. Profitt requested that Leonard make instruments for him in the Nathan Hicks pattern, perhaps to distinguish them from the Glenns' standard pattern.

Leonard made a limited number of instruments in this pattern. They bear no indication that he is the maker. The instrument in the center in figure 7.3 once had the words F. P. DULCIMER lightly penciled inside the lower left sound hole. The inscription was partially obliterated during restoration, so the initial P. and the letters MER are all that remain. Leonard later examined this instrument and confirmed that he made it.

The Glenns' early instruments reflected their traditional roots. For his first dulcimer, Clifford made frets out of pins with their heads cut off. After that, both Leonard and Clifford made frets out of the wire that is used for electric fences, bending pieces in the shape of staples and inserting them into the fretboard. In their early instruments, the frets were short, running under the melody string only. Later, the staple-style frets were made longer, to extend under all three strings. Finally, they shifted to modern instrument frets; for the first few instruments that they made in this fashion, they took the frets out of old guitars.