Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions

by Ralph Lee Smith

  18. “O Happy Day.” By Philip Doddridge, 1755.

  In the next chapter, we will follow three great migrating groups—the Germans, English, and Scotch-Irish—from the Eastern Seaboard to the frontier, where they all played roles in the history of the dulcimer. Germans took the scheitholt with them, and the English and Scotch-Irish liked what they saw.

  3 Early Traces and Trails

  Early Traces and Trails

  The quest for land shaped much of American history. The earliest arrivals got the best land, or the most. Later arrivals moved west. Such a pattern could not be followed in Europe, where there was no longer much available open land—no “west”—but the vastness of America made it possible.

  THE ROAD WEST

  Soon after Pennsylvania was created in 1682, movement to the west began. Year by year and mile by mile, a road came into being during the 18th century that led from Philadelphia to the “west,” that is, toward and into the mountains, which were our first frontier. The path of the road, which was called the Philadelphia Wagon Road, the Great Valley Road, or just the Great Wagon Road, is shown in figure 3.1. It was not the only path that one could follow to the mountains, but it was the principal one, and it became the most heavily traveled road in Colonial America.

  Early immigrants, largely Germans, moved west from Philadelphia before 1700. By the early 18th century, the “Pennsylvania Dutch” country in eastern Pennsylvania had received many settlers, and settlement had proceeded as far west as present-day York. However, continuation directly west, into the Pennsylvania Alleghenies, was impractical. Through most of the 18th century, there were no roads or established trails through the Pennsylvania portion of the Allegheny Mountains. In addition, the Indians were hostile (justifiably, we would say today), and travel was dangerous.

  Figure 3.1. Maps of the Philadelphia Wagon Road and the Wilderness Road.

  Avoiding the mountains, therefore, the road turned southwest, crossed the Potomac River, and entered the northern end of the Valley of Virginia, known as the Shenandoah Valley. The Valley of Virginia lies between two parallel, northeast–southwest mountain chains, the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies. The road traversed the valley’s easy terrain to its southern end at Big Lick, now called Roanoke. Some travelers settled in the valley, to the east or west of the road. A few, leaving the road at various points, traveled directly toward or into the mountains.

  German settlers were on the road by the early 18th century. In 1726, an Alsatian named Jost Hite built a house near Winchester, at the head of the Shenandoah Valley, which beckoned German settlers and provided them with a welcoming presence and a staging location.

  At Big Lick, the road divided. The eastern branch crossed the Blue Ridge from west to east through the gap created by the headwaters of the Roanoke River, and then proceeded southward down the Virginia and North Carolina piedmont. Pioneering this route, a group of German Moravian settlers created a settlement at present-day Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1753.

  The western branch of the road reached the New River before travel and settlement were halted and forced back by Indian hostilities during the French and Indian War. When the war was ended by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, westward movement proceeded, and by 1775, a few log cabins stood in clearings on the eastern side of the Holston River. They constituted, by far, the most western settlement in the Colonies.

  In April of that year, Daniel Boone, accompanied by 30 axmen, finished the job. They crossed the Holston and marked a 200-mile trail into Kentucky, through the virgin world of the mountains. The trail passed through three mountain passes that had been previously traversed by Boone in hunting trips to the west: Big Moccasin Gap in Virginia, the Cumberland Gap on the Virginia-Tennessee-Kentucky border, and Pine Mountain Gap in Kentucky (see figure 3.1). Emerging from Pine Mountain Gap, the trail crossed the Cumberland River at a waist-deep ford and proceeded through thick, tangled growths of laurel to the rich land of the Kentucky bluegrass. Boone’s road from the Holston to Fort Boonesboro in Kentucky was called the Wilderness Road, although that name is sometimes applied to the entire road west of Roanoke.

  From the earliest days, the Germans were joined along the road by the English, the Scotch-Irish, and a smattering of other nationalities. Many of the English came from the north of England and shared a common culture with their Scottish neighbors directly over the border. The Scotch-Irish contingent was large, and by the mid-18th century had surpassed the Germans in numbers. The Scotch-Irish were lowland Scots from the border country, who, in the early 17th century, had been resettled on estates in northern Ireland that had been confiscated by the British Crown. Subsequently mistreated by the English authorities, then ravaged by crop failures and famine, they migrated to America in large numbers beginning in the early 18th century.

  In the 60-year period from 1715 to 1785, an estimated 250,000 emigrants of all nationalities moved west, a majority of them traveling the Great Road for part or most of their journey.

  THE SCHEITHOLT FINDS A NEW HOME

  The scheitholt accompanied German settlers down the Wagon Road and to the frontier. Many specimens have been found in the Shenandoah Valley, southwestern Virginia, West Virginia, northeastern Tennessee, and Kentucky. No dated scheitholts have thus far been found west and south of Pennsylvania, but the early ones probably belong to the first half of the 19th century. Virginia’s last traditional scheitholt maker, Junior Davis of Linville, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, died in 2002.

  The instrument illustrated in figure 3.2 has a narrow, untapered body, exactly three inches wide and three inches high, and three strings, of which two pass over the frets. It is beautifully designed and extremely well made, suggesting the work of a cabinetmaker. The instrument entered the shop of Janita Baker of Santa Margarita, California, maker of Blue Lion Dulcimers, for repair. Baker alerted me and put me in touch with its owner, Bob Grove, who lived nearby. “Everything I know about it isn’t much, I’m afraid,” Grove wrote,

  but the history is solid back to my great grandma, Nanny C. Landes, born near Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the mid-1800s. My uncle thought it was made for the wedding of Nanny’s father, John (or possibly Daniel) Landes. If so, that would be in the mid-1800s. The Landeses came to the Shenandoah Valley, as I understand it, most likely in the early 1800s.

  Nanny married Mose Wenger from the same area and they had a daughter, Emma, born in 1885. Emma married Isaac E. Grove, my grandfather, who was born in the area between Staunton and Harrisonburg, Virginia. The Groves had come from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to the Shenandoah Valley (Augusta County) earlier. There is evidence that Martin Grove bought land near New Hope, Virginia in 1793. Martin Grove was the great grandfather of Isaac E. Grove.

  FROM SCHEITHOLT TO DULCIMER

  Three things happened to the scheitholt as it filtered down the Shenan-doah Valley and into the mountains.

  First, the instrument lost its name. It had never been known as the scheitholt in America, and, after it left Pennsylvania, the name zitter also disappears from all records of which I am aware. Kimberly Burnette-Dean, in her search of early wills and estate records in southern and southwestern Virginia, which we will soon describe, never encountered a “zitter” in any records. And I never encountered the word in my fieldwork in the Appalachians.

  Figure 3.2. Scheitholt with untapered body and three strings, from the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. (Janita Baker)

  Second, a physical change was introduced. With the zitter or scheitholt, the frets are placed on top of the body, along the edge that faces the player. With the changed instrument, a raised and centered fretboard was mounted on top of the body, and the frets were placed along the fretboard.

  Third, the changed instrument acquired a new name. In our earliest handwritten records, it is called a dulcimer—or dulcimore or delcimore, the latter two being phonetic renditions of how the word was pronounced.

  As the 19th century progressed, the dulcimer increasingly displaced the scheitholt in the mountains
. By the 20th century, knowledge of the dulcimer’s descent from the German instrument had been lost. The dulcimer now existed among people of English-speaking ancestry and was used to play songs and tunes in the English, Scottish, and Irish traditions.

  One can guess why the scheitholt was modified into the dulcimer, and why the dulcimer was liked. In its German-American world, the scheitholt was used to play slow tunes, principally hymns (see the list of hymns that accompanies the scheitholt made by Samuel Shank in 1861, in chapter 2), and was often bowed. It was not well suited to strumming fast tunes with a flexible implement such as a willow twig, piece of leather, or quill. In its inward stroke, the strumming device would give the small, usually narrow body of the scheitholt a destabilizing whack before it reached the strings, and continued strumming would damage the instrument’s body.

  However, faster tunes were high on the list of things that the English and Scotch-Irish wished to play. The fiddle was by far the most popular instrument on the early frontier, and it was widely used for old fiddle tunes and dance music. Traditional folk lyrics were sometimes sung to some of the tunes.

  It was easier to play faster music of this type on the dulcimer than the scheitholt. The playing implement struck the dulcimer’s narrow fretboard instead of the body, reducing the destabilizing effect of strumming, and the wider soundbox added to the instrument’s stability.

  FROM GERMAN TO ENGLISH FOLK CULTURE

  Many 20th-century observers, including me, guessed that the scheitholt had passed across cultures from the Germans to English-speaking people on the early frontier, and that the English-speaking people had modified it into the dulcimer. The Scotch-Irish, in particular, were famous borrowers. Unlike the German immigrants to America, who created highly recognizable artifacts and designs and an identifiably German culture (the Kentucky long rifle was made by Pennsylvania German gunsmiths), the Scotch-Irish, wherever they established communities, copied, adapted, and blended in. For example, the log cabin, quintessential symbol of the Scotch-Irish frontier, did not exist in the ancestral world of Scotland or Ireland and was probably borrowed from Swedish settlers.

  HOW OLD IS THE DULCIMER?

  When I talked to Patrick Gainer in 1980 (see the prologue), there was no dispute that the dulcimer’s history reached back into the 19th century. But the question was, how far back? Many doubted that its origins predated the Civil War. “Show me,” these critics challenged. They noted that no written record or dated instrument had been found that reliably established an earlier date.

  This question was settled with the publication of L. Allen Smith’s Catalogue of Pre-Revival Appalachian Dulcimers in 1983. The book, and the dissertation on which it is based, provided a flood of information about the dulcimer that was based on field research. Smith had rigged up an old van with a white inside panel against which dulcimers could be placed and photographed. In 1973 and 1974, he drove this portable photo studio over hill and dale, through the length and breadth of Appalachia. Whenever he located a dulcimer in a museum or in private hands that was made before 1940 (Smith was conservative about borderline cases and did not include them), the instrument entered the van for a detailed photo shoot. He also studied its construction, took numerous measurements, secured all the information he could from its owner, and recorded its scale when this was possible.

  Most of the dulcimers that Smith examined were undated, and most of those with dates were from the late 19th or early 20th century. However, two were earlier. One bore problematic penciled inscriptions; the other had an inscription that was not problematic at all.

  The penciled inscriptions appear inside an old hourglass-shaped dulcimer owned by Anne Grimes, an Ohio collector, which is listed as E39 in his catalogue. One inscription, inside the bottom left sound hole, reads, “R.P.B. 21.49/Louisa, Ky.” The other, inside the upper left sound hole, reads, “R.B. igg/2-21.49.” The numbers 2-21.49 certainly look like a date—February 21, 1849—but there is no way to know when the notations were written or exactly what they mean. Always the careful scholar, Smith confines himself to saying, “If the 1849 interpretation could be substantiated, E39 would be the oldest of the [hourglass-shaped] dulcimers.”

  For whatever it is worth, I believe the inscriptions and date are trustworthy. Louisa, Kentucky, is across the Big Sandy River from Huntington, West Virginia, home of the post–Civil War hourglass-shaped dulcimer maker Charles N. Prichard. Furthermore, in nearby Lawrence County, Kentucky, the 1880 U.S. Census lists Charles’s brother John as a dulcimer maker (see chapter 5). Something involving hourglass-shaped dulcimers was going on in this area, of which Smith’s E39 might have been an early part.

  Whatever uncertainty surrounds the date of E39, no one doubts the authenticity of the inscription that runs along the side of a single-bout instrument with S-shaped sound holes and a “solid-D” tailpiece that is owned by Paul Holbrook of Lexington, Kentucky, shown in figures 3.3 and 3.4. It passed down through the McClung family, Holbrook’s mother’s family, which migrated from Virginia to Rupert and Greenbrier County in West Virginia, then to Ashland, Kentucky. The inscription reads: “Floyd County Virginia made by John Scales Jr August the 28th 1832.”

  Figure 3.3. Paul Holbrook of Lexington, Kentucky, with a dulcimer made by John Scales Jr., Floyd County, Virginia, 1832, that passed down in Holbrook’s family. (Ken Kurtz)

  Figure 3.4. Inscription on the side of the Scales dulcimer, which reads, “Floyd County Virginia made by John Scales Jr. August the 28th 1832.” (Ken Kurtz)

  Smith found no record of John Scales in courthouse records of Floyd and Montgomery counties, but Kimberly Burnette-Dean, whose work will soon be described, found him in courthouse records of Patrick County, directly south of Floyd County. He was listed as a cabinetmaker, age 42, living in the little community of Ararat, just above the North Carolina line, with his wife Judith and eight children. His woodworking skill is well attested by the finely crafted dulcimer.

  EARLY VIRGINIA RECORDS

  The Scales dulcimer ended controversy over whether dulcimers existed before the Civil War, but it left a clamoring bunch of unanswered questions about the dulcimer’s early history, from 1860 back to the beginnings. When did the dulcimer first put in an appearance? Where? How common was it? Who owned and played it? Was it fairly evenly distributed geographically, or did it tend to exist in pockets or clusters, surrounded by areas and people that knew little or nothing about it? Where were these pockets? Does its early dissemination track the general path of the Philadelphia Wagon Road and the Wilderness Road?

  Several small pieces of enticing information appear in Paul Gifford’s monumental study The Hammered Dulcimer, published in 2001 (p. 244):

  An 1825 inventory of the estate of William Matherly of Pulaski County, Kentucky, lists a “dulcimore,” appraised at three dollars.

  An 1842 inventory of the estate of Conrad Staines, also of Pulaski County, lists a “dulcime,” appraised at 50 cents.

  In nearby Casey County, an 1840 inventory of the estate of Isaiah Clifton lists a dulcimer, valued at one dollar.

  Gifford observes that the low valuation of these instruments, as well as the difficulty of transporting large, heavy hammered dulcimers to such places in early times, argues against their being hammered dulcimers. The dates, which straddle the dates of Scales’s instrument, and the appearance of the vernacular term dulcimore as early as 1825 also indicate that we are probably not looking at scheitholts or zitters. “Although these south central Kentucky dulcimers were probably not hammered dulcimers,” Gifford states, “systematic research in probate inventories in other areas may offer further evidence of the use and spread of that and other instruments during this period.”

  Kimberly Burnette-Dean, lead historical interpreter at Virginia’s Explore Park in Roanoke in the early 2000s and a dulcimer enthusiast, proved him right. Burnette-Dean submitted a grant proposal to the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH), seeking funding to search estate and appraisal records in the courthouses of
12 counties in southern and southwestern Virginia for the period 1780-1860 for mentions of dulcimers. If she found any, she would research the names and families of the sellers and buyers.

  The grant request was approved and the project funded. Burnette-Dean went to work, struggling for long hours with the ancient, stone-heavy courthouse books, working slowly in order to miss nothing. The handwritten entries were often hard to decipher, and, in some instances, were faded or defaced. At the end of each day, she was exhausted. For a while, she found nothing and wondered if the whole project would turn out to be a bust. Then dulcimers began to appear! At the time she submitted her report, The Dulcimer in Southwestern Virginia, to VFH in 2005, we knew of only one well-documented pre-Civil War dulcimer—that made by Scales—along with one likely candidate, the “2-21.49” instrument, and the three from Kentucky records cited by Gifford. Burnette-Dean’s report added 39 more!

  As she conducted her study, Burnette-Dean recorded all mentions of musical instruments. The fiddle was clearly the most popular. A total of 103 were listed in the records, with the earliest being in Bedford County in 1780. Remarkably, dulcimers, at 39, were next! The earliest ones were recorded in 1818, in both Bedford and Franklin counties. Equally interesting, there were no banjos listed. Perhaps homemade banjos existed but were regarded as having too little value to include in the inventories.

  Three counties—Franklin, Wythe, and Grayson—together accounted for 32 of the 39 dulcimers. The crest of the Blue Ridge approximately follows today’s Blue Ridge Parkway, with Franklin County lying along the Blue Ridge’s eastern slopes, and Grayson and Wythe lying in and across the mountains. In the early days, many Germans seeking to settle in southern and southwestern Virginia apparently found the area east of the Blue Ridge to be somewhat less than friendly to their arrival, and continued west. In her report, Burnette-Dean says that Wythe County received the largest number of Germans of any county south of Augusta County, which is halfway down the Virginia Valley.