Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions (22 page)

The instrument came with an interesting narrative history. The seller, Ronnie Chastain of Corinth, Mississippi, is a direct descendant of the owner, who may also have been the maker. After Vice bought the instrument, she contacted Chastain, who wrote her a letter and sent her two photos of the owner. The letter read in part as follows (orthography preserved):

Carilyn, This handmaid dulcimer was recovered from my great, great grandfather's smokehouse after his death in 1964. His name was Benjamin Franklin Hardin & he married Nancy Ella Voyles in 1895. Abby Voyles, a close kin to Ella Hardin was known to have been a musician & could have been the one who played this homemade instrument. . . . Ben Hardin was a carpenter here in Corinth, Mississippi where he built several houses. He was born in the late 1860s or early 1870s and had 8 children. . . . This is all I can remember on this part of my family.

 

Figure 8.4. “Tennessee Music Box” from Mississippi. (Carilyn Vice)

Corinth is in the upper northeast corner of Mississippi, a short distance from southern middle 

Tennessee area that is the Tennessee music box's principal home.

Black playing traditions for the dulcimer are at the top of everyone's list of information that we would most like to retrieve. The following letter, which I received from Wayne Seymour, a dulcimer player of Reidsville, North Carolina, is of immense interest:

My wife's grandfather, Ney A. Lynch, was born in Burlington, North Carolina, about 30 miles west of Greensboro. When he would visit us, there would be times when I would be practicing my guitar, banjo, mandolin, etc. He never seemed to mind, but neither did he show any particular interest in either the instruments or the music.

However, one day I had the dulcimer out and he became very interested. He asked me “What is that thing?” I told him it was a dulcimer. He went back to his reading, but in a few minutes he turned to me and asked, “Did they ever paint 'em black?” I told him yes, that it was common. He then became quite animated. He told me that when he was a young man, the black tobacco workers would bring the dulcimer along with the fiddle and banjo and play as they sat up all night feeding the fire at the tobacco barns. He excitedly sketched me a rough rectangular instrument. He said that the blacks called this a “coffin box” and that they were always painted black and strummed with a feather. He remembers this from his childhood, so this would have been about the turn of the century. He was impressed by the fact that he had never seen any other instrument that was played in the lap.

Mr. Lynch passed away about seven years ago, but I interviewed him about this several times and he recalled the details of the instrument very well. He told me that he thought the player's last name was Blackstock. This was of little or no help, since Blackstock is one of the most common African-American names in that area of NC.

Dulcimer lovers who live in the former tobacco-growing piedmont of North Carolina, go to work! Breakthroughs may await.

In today's dulcimer-playing world, black performers are beginning to manifest interest in using the dulcimer to play African-American roots music. In 2009, Mars Hill College in Mars Hill, North Carolina, sponsored a week of music instruction called, “Strings, Rhythm, and Song: African-American Roots.” Instructors included Bing Futch, who has both black and Seminole Indian ancestry, teaching “Mississippi Delta–style mountain dulcimer.”

In 1993, I visited the fine dulcimer maker Warren May at his shop in Berea, Kentucky. The dulcimers crafted by May that were hanging on the wall were beautiful, but I also noticed that one of the instruments was an antique. At my request, he took it down for me to examine. It was the instrument that is illustrated here in figure 8.5.

The instrument is made of poplar. Its many remarkable features include holes drilled all over the top and sides, two small facing “chevrons” cut midway down the top, and a marvelous decorative tailpiece that is mounted on the body. The sides are flat at the body's widest point, giving it a coffin-like shape. The peg box is surmounted by a small, stubby scroll. Perhaps most remarkable of all, the instrument's eight frets are movable!

When the dulcimer entered May's possession in 1978, it was accompanied by a slip of paper stating that it had come from Pineville, Kentucky. Pineville is the site of the Cumberland Ford, a famous landmark on the Wilderness Road. One wonders—is it a dulcimer of the Road? Or did it at least see the ford while it was still in use?

May began making dulcimers in 1972. In 1978, he was approached by the man who owned this dulcimer and wished to exchange it for a new Warren May dulcimer. May agreed. At that time, his dulcimers cost $125. May later learned that the man had found the old dulcimer in a junk shop in Bardstown, Kentucky, and had paid $35 for it. Still, May says he doesn't regret the trade!

Flat, coffin-like sides are an unusual dulcimer design. But then I received an email from Elsie Cameron of Raeford, North Carolina, who had been in my dulcimer class at Appalachian State University in 1997. “Check out this dulcimer on eBay,” she wrote, adding that Hope Mills, North Carolina, the seller's address, is not far from Raeford.

I looked. Here was another dulcimer with straight sides at its widest point! And it also had a stubby scroll on top of its peg box! The instrument is shown in figure 8.6. Other features of the instrument associate it with the Virginia tradition, which found its way south of the Virginia–North Carolina border. These include sound holes drilled into the fretboard and the absence of a strum hollow at the foot of the fretboard.

I emailed Carilyn Vice, who bid and won. She asked the seller for all the information he could supply about the instrument. The seller replied:

We were on the other side of a town called Sanford here in NC when we ran up on a sale there, Saturday. We stopped in. All we know is that this was an elderly man who had passed away and the kin folk were selling off his personal belongings. He had lived mostly around the Boone area [all] his life and was pretty much a loner from what his kids said. He was in his 90s when passing away.

Figure 8.5. Flat-sided dulcimer with small headstock, from Pineville, Kentucky.

Figure 8.6. Flat-sided dulcimer with small headstock, from western North Carolina. (Carilyn Vice)

Is the fact that both of these instruments have straight sides and stubby scrolls a coincidence, or are we getting a misty look at a shared design tradition despite the many differences in the instruments? What's your guess?

In October 1995, Kay Zingsheim of Overland, Kansas, sent me several pictures of a remarkable instrument. In her letter, she said in part:

I play hammered dulcimer and am in the Prairie Dulcimer Club. At our June 2nd Festival, a man from southern Missouri walked into the festival carrying this dulcimer on his shoulder, and informed everyone that he wanted to get “rid of this thing, it's been taking up space in my storage shed for 25 years.” I looked it over with some of my fellow club members and paid the man what he was asking.

The instrument is made of walnut and is 37 inches long, 15 inches wide, and 27 inches high. Eleven pedals control 11 stops that depress five strings running over a series of frets. A sixth string runs over a separate set of frets that duplicate the intervals of the frets under the five-string set for the first 11 frets, then continues beyond for another octave. The intervals of the fret sequence are chromatic. The stops make it possible to play barre chords to accompany a melody played on the sixth string.

The label on the front panel reads “
SIEGRIST
Dulcimer
PATENTED.
” Zingsheim did some research and made a remarkable discovery. In 1878, a person named Paul L. Siegrist, who lived in New York State, received a patent for a loom that was operated by dampers!

Further checking revealed that the fall 1980 issue of
Dulcimer Players News
carried a letter and accompanying photograph from a reader named Joe Williams of Hoyt, Kansas. The instrument in Joe's photograph strongly resembles Zingsheim's instrument, complete with 11 stops and foot pedals, except that its body is shaped like a large hourglass-style dulcimer. “The only thing we know about it,” Williams wrote, “is that it was made by a chiropractor in Plainville, Kansas about 50 years ago.”

Another piece of evidence appeared in the April 1981 issue of
Frets
magazine. Writing in the magazine's “Experts Corner” column, Michael Rugg states that he had seen Williams's letter and photo in
Dulcimer Players News
and was adding to the historical record the patent drawing for the Siegrist dulcimer. A copy is shown in figure 8.7. The drawing shows that Siegrist applied for the patent on August 10, 1933, and that the patent was granted on January 15, 1935. The patented version has the dulcimer-shaped body of the instrument shown in the photo that accompanies Williams's letter in 
Dulcimer Players News
. As patented, the instrument had only three stops, whose placement suggests that they were meant to play subdominant, dominant, and tonic chords as desired to accompany the melody, analogous to simple three-chord guitar playing.

Figure 8.7. Patent drawing of the Siegrist dulcimer.

Since Zingsheim acquired her Siegrist, several more have surfaced, including one on eBay. Bidding was brisk, and the winner had to fight off a lot of interested bidders to get it.

Chapter 5 relates the mountain tale that four-year-old Nineveh Presnell used the dulcimer his father had made for him, as a sled. While that may or may not be true, there is no doubt that, on at least one occasion, the opposite happened—a sled became a dulcimer!

Barbara Seymour of Moylan, Pennsylvania, sent me several photographs of this dulcimer, one of which appears as figure 8.8. “My friend, Chris, found it at the Swarthmore Friends Meeting jumble sale, and bought it for about $25,” Barbara wrote. If you have been wondering what to do with that old Flexible Flyer in your garage, here's the answer.