Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions (4 page)

By this time, Abrahams had acquired a Ph.D. and become associate director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Oral History at the University of Texas at Austin. In October 1968, I wrote to him, asking him from whom he had acquired the dulcimers. He replied:

You really hit me a low one asking about those dulcimers. I have now lost a week's sleep trying to think of that guy's name who made them. He lived in the Beech Creek area right under Beech Mountain, North Carolina, and was therefore a neighbor of all the Presnells, Frank Profitt, Doc Watson, etc. He was a farmer about age 35 who made those things during his spare time during the winter. He made about twenty dulcimers and a like number of squirrel-skin banjos for me, many of which I sold through Izzy. He died in the summer of 1957 of a heart attack, sad to say. I am sorry I can't give you his name. Dave Van Ronk has the oak dulcimer that his grandfather made. It is the kind of dulcimer that is commonly made in the Beech Mountain area; the best-known maker from that area is Edd Presnell.

Abrahams's response really piqued my curiosity! I wrote to Edd Presnell, providing the information Abrahams had given me and asking Presnell if he knew who the maker might be. He sent me a handwritten reply. Here it is, with orthography preserved:

Banner Elk N.C.
Dec 17, 1968
Dear Mr. Smith

Thank you for your letter regarding who made your old Dulcimer. After making a few phone calls I contacted Edna Shepherd now remarried who was the wife of Frank Glenn the man who made your Dulcimer. She recalled the name of Abraham as the man they Had Shipped a number of Dulcimers to. Hope this answers your questions. Whenever you are in this area Drop by to see me.

Thanks
Sincerely
Edd R. Presnell

I then contacted Edna Shepherd myself and drove down to western North Carolina to visit her. I learned from her that Frank Glenn was related to Leonard and Clifford Glenn (see chapter 7) and was Clifford's cousin. (I subsequently learned that Frank, in addition to being a farmer, worked part-time in a furniture factory during the winter months. His correct date of death was April 5, 1960, age 39.) She brought out three of Frank's dulcimers and offered to give me one! I refused to accept it. “I have one,” I said, “and it's wonderful!”

I also visited Edd Presnell. He showed me a dulcimer made by Ben Hicks about 1935 and told me about the legend of “the Stranger from the West” (see both figure 5.7 and the story in chapter 5). I returned home, hooked for life, and this book is one of the results.

2 Where Did the Dulcimer Come From?

Where Did the Dulcimer Come From?

The origins of the dulcimer kept many people guessing for a long time. There were several theories, each with its partisans.

Could it be that the dulcimer didn't come from anywhere—that it was “born in the hills” of Appalachia? Many mountain people thought so. The July 21, 1963, issue of the
New York Times
carried a story with the headline, “Kentucky Dulcimer Maker Says Interest Gains in U.S.” The story described the rapidly growing sales being enjoyed by old-time maker Jethro Amburgey of Hindman, Kentucky (see chapter 6). “The dulcimer, as we now know it, has never been traced down as to who originated it,” the article quotes Amburgey as saying. “The best information obtained is that it originated in the Appalachian highlands.”

When Jean Ritchie was a youngster growing up in the Cumberlands in the 1920s and 1930s, she thought so, too. The opinion was undoubtedly shared by many people in her world. “Once I would have been ready to fight with anyone who dared to say or imply that our plucked dulcimer did not originate in our own Southern Appalachians,” she wrote in her book,
The Dulcimer Book
, published in 1963. “To me, Kentucky mountain songs and their dulcimer accompaniments seem to have been made at the same time and for each other.”

Some people, however, doubted that an instrument as well developed as the dulcimer had never been seen anywhere else. For these people, the logical place of ancestry was the British Isles. This theory had reinforcement from the facts that the instrument's traditional home in the mountains was among settlers whose ancestors came from the British Isles and that music played on it in its mountain world was of English, Scottish, and Irish origin. People who favored this view included Patrick Gainer, John Jacob Niles, and Jean Thomas, founder of the American Folk Song Festival. All had great familiarity with the Appalachian world.

The theory was backed up by information that was associated with some old instruments. For example, in January 1957, Ed Cray of Los Angeles purchased a dulcimer from the estate of a lady named Stella Campbell of Pasadena, California. A handwritten slip of paper accompanying the instrument stated that it is “Scotch,” of the kind “made by the Clan Campbell for five generations.”

There was one persistent problem with this theory. No one could find a dulcimer, or any other type or form of diatonically fretted zither, in the traditional cultures of England, Scotland, or Ireland. It was the play, but with no Hamlet.

A third possibility was cited by Josephine McGill in her article on the dulcimer that she published in
The Musician
in 1917:

As is true of more familiar instruments, the origin of the dulcimer is obscure. Strangely enough, it bears closer resemblance to the eighteenth-century German zither than to any other known instrument. (See
Catalogue of Musical Instruments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
, 1901, page 51. No. 988.)

Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp's collaborator, picked up the thread. In her introduction to
English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians
, published in 1932, she wrote:

The history of [the dulcimer's] introduction into the mountains is obscure, but it may be noted that a similar instrument, catalogued as a German zither of the eighteenth century, is exhibited in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and if this classification is correct it is possible that the instrument was introduced by the early German settlers, who drifted into the mountains from Pennsylvania.

In a footnote, Karpeles identified the instrument as “Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments, No. 988.”

As it turned out, it was a classic case of being led into the right barn by the wrong horse. What is item no. 988 in the Met's Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments? It is a three-string, hourglass-shaped instrument with heart-shaped sound holes, looking exactly like a traditional American dulcimer—which is exactly what it is!

In the period 1974–1977, a researcher named L. Allen Smith traveled throughout Appalachia, searching for, finding, and photographing old dulcimers and learning everything he could about their histories. In 1979, he incorporated his findings into a doctoral dissertation, and in 1983 he summarized the information in a book entitled
A Catalogue of Pre-Revival Appalachian Dulcimers.
The book described 191 instruments made prior to 1940, of which 155 were dulcimers and 36 were a type of instrument that Allen called “Pennsylvania German zithers.” We will hear more about his work, and about these “zithers,” soon.

Allen's finds included seven virtually identical instruments, with several of them bearing fragments of labels indicating that they had been made in Huntington, West Virginia (see chapter 5). One of them was the Metropolitan Museum's no. 988, which the museum had acquired in 1889! Actually, the Met already believed that the instrument was misidentified. When no. 988 had been catalogued, there was virtually no scholarly knowledge of the dulcimer. In the museum world, more was then known about things that had been made in Europe hundreds of years ago than was known about items that were then being made a few hundred miles away.

Wrong horse. But what about the barn, Germany? And those “Pennsylvania German zithers”?

WHAT JEAN RITCHIE SAW

In 1948, having graduated summa cum laude from the University of Kentucky, Jean Ritchie, of Viper, Kentucky, arrived in New York to do social work at Henry Street Settlement. She brought a dulcimer with her. It created a sensation, and soon ran away with her life. By 1950, she had begun to give public performances and had made her first record.

In 1949, Ritchie visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a friend. There she saw something that astonished her. It wasn't no. 988, it was something else. In her own words in
The Dulcimer Book
, she described the scene:

As we were strolling from room to room, we noticed a case holding an exhibition of old stringed musical instruments. One of them caught my eye because it had a familiar look about it, being a long box-like thing with the same musical scale (same spacing between frets, on a similarly-shaped soundbox) as our Kentucky dulcimers. The label gave it the name, German scheitholt.

Ritchie was immediately convinced that, unlikely as it might seem, the instrument she was looking at was the long-sought-after genuine ancestor of the Appalachian dulcimer. She was right.

The instrument in the Met's display case was a member of a family of northern and eastern European fretted zithers. Under various names and in numerous shapes and forms, they had existed and thrived in the folk cultures of many countries as far back as the Renaissance and, probably, the later Middle Ages. In German-speaking areas, the instrument was called the
scheitholt
; in the Low Countries, the
hummel
or
Nordische balk
; in northeastern France, the
epinette des Vosges
; in Norway, the
langeleik
; in Sweden, the
humle
; and in Finland, the
jouhi kantele.
A one-string instrument with a raised and centered fretboard, called a
psalmodikon
, also developed in Norway and Sweden. Fretted zithers were made and played in Hungary and Romania as well, and the instrument even migrated to Iceland, where it was called the
langspil
.

The earliest dated specimen so far found is from 1608. It is illustrated in a publication entitled
De Hommel in de Lage Landen
(The Hummel in the Low Countries) by Hubert Boone, issued by the Brussels Museum of Musical Instruments in 1975. The instrument, which is in the Community Museum at The Hague, is thin and narrow and had either one or two strings (it currently has one peg, and the photograph is unclear).

Fretted zithers were folk instruments, and they endured a long history of disdain by mainstream musicologists. In Boone's publication, he cites the opinion of an 18th-century Friesian musical authority, John Wilhelm Lustig. In the introduction to his book
Inleiding tot de Muzierkkunde
, published in 1771, Lustig states that he will have nothing to do with such instruments as the
noorsche balk
, which, he says, are played at fairs and by soldiers.

Whoever may have played them, at least one American scholar, Charles Seeger, regarded such instruments as prime suspects in the search for the dulcimer's origins. In an article entitled “The Appalachian Dulcimer,” which appeared in the
Journal of American Folklore
(January–March 1958), Seeger stated his opinion that the dulcimer is a full-fledged member of this European group. The dulcimer, Seeger wrote, is a

fretted zither
(Griffbrettzither)
belonging to a well-defined subclass upon which the melody is played on one string (or several in unison or even parallel thirds) while others sound as drones. The subclass is well represented in European organography especially in the northern region. . . . The European provenience of our instrument [the dulcimer] is clearly established in all but minor detail.

Seeger doesn't specify what he meant by “minor detail,” but he may have had in mind one noticeable difference between most European fretted zithers and the Appalachian dulcimer. With only a few atypical exceptions, the series of frets on European fretted zithers is applied directly to the instrument's top, along the edge that faces the player. With the dulcimer, the series of frets is placed on a raised fretboard that runs down the center of the top. Freed from the necessity of having a straight side facing the player, the body of the dulcimer usually has various broader shapes, with the most common type being a single or double curve.

Some types of northern European fretted zithers are known in the United States. Figure 2.1 is a photo of a player of the Norwegian langeleik, in full traditional Norwegian costume. The instrument's features include a peg of trefoil design on the side, matching the design of the pegs in the peg box. Fred Petrick, a loyal member of the jungle telegraph, spotted the photo on eBay, bid on it, won it, scanned it in, and sent it to me. “It's a
carte de visite,
about 2X4 inches, out of Minnesota,” he wrote.
“Cartes de visite
were a popular photo type from around the Civil War to about 1900.” Regarding the player's costume, Petrick explained, “I Googled ‘Norwegian costume 19th century' and immediately learned that our mystery player is wearing a 19th-century costume called a
bunad.
It's still popular today.”