Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions

by Ralph Lee Smith

  Fine Player

  Uncle Ed was an excellent player with a good repertoire, and he loved to play. Mal Gibson says that Uncle Ed used to sit on the porch of the Thomas log cabin and play to his heart’s content.

  I interviewed Lone Madden, Thomas’s 78-year-old grandson, by phone. Madden heard his grandfather play many times and named five tunes that, according to his recollection, Uncle Ed played: “Cripple Creek,” “Sourwood Mountain,” “Groundhog,” “Pretty Polly,” and “Darling Corey.” The presence of “Pretty Polly” on this list suggests that Thomas may have understood the Dorian and/or Aeolian tuning. But maybe not—I have heard Edd Presnell’s wife Nettie (see chapter 7) play “Shady Grove” on the Dorian scale but with the instrument tuned Ionian.

  Folk Woodcarver

  In addition to being a woodworker and cabinetmaker, Thomas was a carver. Two informants told us that he carved owls and other birds. One said that an owl carved by Thomas had stood on a corner post of their porch railing for many years, but then had disappeared. No one that we talked to knew where any of his carvings could now be found.

  JOSIAH H. COMBS (1886–1960)

  Koyuki and I stopped at Berea College on our way to the mountains, and there we learned that a Thomas dulcimer had been donated to the college by the widow of D. K. Wilgus, a University of California at Los Angeles folklorist. The instrument had belonged to Josiah H. Combs, a pioneer Kentucky dulcimer player, scholar, and folklorist who was born and raised in the mountains. This dulcimer, dated October 28, 1903, the second oldest Thomas that is currently known, is the left-hand instrument in figure 6.3. It is, by some nine years, the oldest Thomas yet found that has heart-shaped sound holes.

  The instrument at Berea College is not numbered anywhere that is visible to external inspection. (It should be noted that Thomas dulcimer no. 469, the oldest known, is also not numbered in any place visible. H. E. Matheny, who restored the instrument from damaged and disassembled pieces, found the number written on the bottom surface of the fretboard. The instrument, made in 1891, has diamond-shaped sound holes at the upper bout and crescent-moon-shaped sound holes at the lower bout—see figure 6.3.)

  Josiah Combs, born and raised in the Cumberlands near Hindman, was the star student in the little common school that he attended, and he read voraciously on his own. He was one of two members of the first graduating class of Hindman Settlement School, receiving his diploma in 1904.

  The Knott County History contains an informal autobiographical essay written by Combs. It is undated but, from internal evidence, was written about 1914, when he was 28. Regarding his childhood, Combs says:

  During vacation from school, when I was at work on the farm, I usually carried a book of some sort up to the cornfield with me. When we sat down to rest, I would read. I “finished” many of the classics in this way. People would say, “W’y, that ’ere boy’s a reading hisself plum’ to death; he’ll never get over hit.”

  Books were scarce in his world, and there were no libraries. Every night for a year or two, Combs walked a mile to Hindman, whose population was then about three hundred, to sell the Cincinnati Post to earn money to buy books.

  Katherine Pettit and May Stone, the founders of Hindman Settlement School, spent some time in the area before launching the school and quickly became acquainted with the bookish mountain boy. One day Pettit encountered him walking along the road barefoot, reading a book. “Well, what are you reading now?” she asked. “Hist’ry!” Combs cheerfully replied.

  When Hindman Settlement School was officially launched in 1902, Combs was one of its initial enrollees. The date of his dulcimer suggests that he may have acquired it while still a student at Hindman. At the school, Pettit took down a number of his songs and ballads and forwarded them to the Journal of American Folklore, where they were published in 1907.

  After graduating from Hindman, Combs received the first scholarship awarded to a Hindman graduate by Kentucky University, now called Transylvania University. The Lexington Herald offered to cover his other expenses. Carrying his dulcimer, Combs journeyed to Lexington with a corncob pipe and less than $5 in his pocket and was enrolled.

  At the university, Combs shared his knowledge of Kentucky mountain folklore with Dr. Hubert G. Shearin, the young head of the English department. Together they compiled A Syllabus of Kentucky Folksongs, which was published in 1911. Combs followed this with two other books, The Kentucky Highlanders (1912) and All That’s Kentucky: An Anthology (1915).

  After graduation, Combs taught in several high schools and colleges and served overseas in World War I. He then enrolled at the University of Paris, where he graduated summa cum laude with an M.A., earned a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, and married a French wife. Combs’s doctoral thesis, written in French, was a study of the ballads and folk songs of his native Kentucky; it was published in Paris in 1925 under the title FolkSongs du Midi des Etats-Unis. After returning from France, Combs was professor of French and German at the University of Oklahoma, head of the Department of Foreign Languages at Texas Christian University, and head of the French Department at Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia. He retired in 1956 and died four years later.

  Throughout his career, Combs collected Kentucky songs, ballads, and folklore and played his 1903 Thomas dulcimer. As far as I can determine, he was the first native of the mountains to carry the dulcimer and its music to audiences beyond Appalachia. “Wherever I went, the people always gazed at the strange musical instrument I carried under my arm,” he writes.

  In his essay, Combs describes playing his “dulcimore” at an evening “smoker” event in Cleveland when he was delivering a paper at a meeting of the American Dialect Society. In 1913, at a meeting of the Kentuck-ians of New York City, held at Delmonico’s, he explained the dulcimer in an after-dinner speech. “Can you pick that thing?’ one of the Kentuckians asked. “I wouldn’t pack ’er ef I couldn’ pick ’er!” Combs grinned. And he proceeded to prove it.

  In 1940, at Texas Christian University where Combs was teaching, John and Bess Lomax recorded him for the Library of Congress, playing his Thomas dulcimer. The recordings are listed in appendix A.

  HINDMAN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL

  By the time Hindman Settlement School was founded in 1902, people had been filtering into the remote valleys and ridges of the Cumberlands for more than a hundred years. Some came by way of the Wilderness Road. After the road crossed the sparkling waters of the Cumberland River ford at present-day Pineville, Kentucky, it continued west into Kentucky’s bluegrass country. However, one could leave the road there, turn northeast, follow the hollows and dry creek beds between the Cumberland mountain ranges, and enter a virgin mountain world. Game and timber were plentiful, and a family could settle on a little land along a creek bottom or on a hillside. This is what some hardy people did.

  In Letcher County and its surrounding area, people also arrived through Pound Gap, a pass in the Cumberland Mountains about 50 miles north of the Cumberland Gap, near present-day Jenkins, Kentucky. At Pound Gap, Virginia shares its border with Letcher County.

  The people who settled the Cumberlands lived in relative isolation throughout the 19th century and preserved an immense treasure of speech, music, and folkways that have kept folklorists busy ever since. Mountaineers made by hand much of what they needed and wanted, including musical instruments, and eked out a self-reliant existence in “the Land of Do-Without.” They also developed a fabled sense of humor, laughing at the great difficulties of mountain life in stories and song.

  However, things did not become easier with the passage of time. As the 19th century progressed, timber and game were depleted. Big mountain families, who typically occupied one- and two-room windowless log cabins, exceeded the capacity of the little hardscrabble farms to provide. As farms were divided among sons, the difficulty increased. Travel and communications were immensely difficult. And even if there had been roads to markets, the mountain people had almost nothing to sell. There was little acces
s to health facilities or to education. Disease, infant mortality, and illiteracy rose to high levels.

  These conditions were brought forcefully to the attention of the outside world in the latter years of the 19th century by a series of violent family feuds in the mountains that claimed many lives. Problems in the Cumberlands became a major interest of women’s clubs, church groups, and civic groups in Kentucky’s bluegrass region during the 1890s. Both in the mountains and beyond, there was widespread belief that training and education were the keys to providing the mountain people with a better life.

  In 1899, with backing from the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, May Stone, Kath-erine Pettit, and two other women, made the two-day, 40-mile trip by “jolt wagon” from the railhead to the mountains. There they conducted summer educational activities for adults and children in tents set up on hillsides overlooking the village of Hazard in Perry County. The activity created a sensation in the area. Local people begged the ladies to return, and discussion of a school was immediately begun. Pettit and Stone conducted similar summer camps in nearby locations in 1900 and 1901, with equal success. Then, with funding from western Kentucky patrons, with small sums from the mountain people, and with eagerly donated labor, they launched Hindman Settlement School.

  The school opened in the fall of 1902 with 162 pupils, on a donated piece of land on the edge of the little town that included the small meadow at the forks of Troublesome Creek and the adjoining narrow hillside. From its inception, it provided quality education up through high school, a level of education that was at that time unobtainable in the area. Students living beyond walking distance, which was most of them, boarded at the school. Students paid what they could; ability to pay was never a factor in the acceptance of students.

  In addition to providing formal primary and secondary school education, Stone and Pettit launched community activities, including encouragement of local skills such as basket making, weaving, and spinning. Efforts were made to find markets beyond the mountains for homemade crafts. A “Fireside Industries Department” was organized for this purpose.

  Hindman’s administrators and teachers were largely drawn from the educated middle and upper classes of New York and New England. Most were young women graduates of such colleges as Smith, Vassar, Holyoke, and Wellesley. Typical was Elizabeth Watts, who arrived in 1909 to serve as a primary-level teacher. Her stepfather was head of the English Depart- ment at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and was chief book reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly. She remained to become assistant director of the school in 1924, and director after Stone passed away in 1946. Pettit left Hindman in 1912 to found Pine Mountain Settlement School in an even more remote area of the Cumberlands.

  Hindman struggled with a perpetual waiting list. Some adults and children didn’t wait; they walked. In 1912, Watts wrote to her mother:

  Yesterday three new little girls arrived. They came from Floyd County above Beaver Creek and they walked fifty long miles with their father who will have to walk it back again, poor man! They left home one morning getting here the next day at noon . . . the least girl was only six. They had hardly anything to eat along the way for wherever they stopped the folks had no bread.

  One of the settlement’s major interests was traditional Appalachian music. The settlement served as a center for gathering and redisseminating folk songs, and it hosted folksong collectors who gathered many old songs and tunes from the students.

  The teachers and administrators quickly became acquainted with Uncle Ed Thomas and his dulcimers. To them, the dulcimer’s physical beauty, its mist-enshrouded origins that they assumed traced back to Elizabethan England, the perpetuation of the instrument and playing methods in the mountains without outside influence, and the body of traditional music that was known to the players made it the perfect expression of traditional mountain culture. Teachers bought dulcimers from Thomas and secured many sales for him among their families and friends back east.

  The dulcimer became a prominent symbol of mountain culture and the Settlement School. The school assigned dulcimer-making and -playing an important place among the mountain arts to be preserved, fostered, and integrated into its educational program. Students made dulcimers in the school’s shop and played them, as a central feature of the school’s emphasis on encouraging mountain children to value their traditions rather than to regard them as inferior to modern education and new ways.

  JETHRO AMBURGEY (1895–1971)

  Jethro Amburgey was the next-to-last child of Wiley Amburgey, who had 21 children by two wives. Wiley was born in Virginia or North Carolina— Jethro wasn’t sure. At the age of four, Wiley arrived in Letcher County in 1827 with his father Ambrose and family. Ambrose settled on Little Carr Creek near Wolfpen Stream, built a log home, raised first one large family and then another, and learned to be a surveyor.

  Jethro began school in an old log schoolhouse near his home. After a few years, he heard of Hindman Settlement School, which was 10 miles away. His parents agreed that he could enroll, with the understanding that he would “work his way.” Hindman enrolled the bright, serious lad in the sixth grade.

  When the United States entered World War I, a number of Hindman boys became restless. They often talked together about the battles in France, which they regarded as heroic adventure. One day early in 1918, several of them, including Jethro, left the school, walked 22 miles to Hazard, and enlisted. After three months of training, Amburgey was sent overseas with the 38th Infantry, 3rd Division, as a member of a machine gun company. He saw action at the Second Battle of the Marne in July 1918 and was wounded in the Argonne.

  After the war, Amburgey returned to Hindman, graduated in 1920, and remained at the school as shop teacher and basketball coach until the early 1930s. He then went back to school at Morehead State University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1935. From 1940 to 1944, he served as Knott County superintendent of schools, but found politics stressful and did not seek reelection. Amburgey continued to teach at various high schools, finally retiring after a teaching career of some 33 years. In 1989, 18 years after his death, he was elected to the Knott County Hall of Fame.

  Knott County remembers Amburgey as one of its finest educators and public officials, but the world remembers him for something that Knott County residents often teased him about—making dulcimers. When he returned to Hindman after World War I, he worked in the school’s woodshop several hours a day to make a little money while completing his schooling. Uncle Ed Thomas often dropped by the shop, passing the time of day and picking up some glue or sandpaper for his dulcimer making. One day Amburgey told Thomas that he would like to learn to make dulcimers and asked Thomas if he would provide him a set of patterns. Uncle Ed realized that sooner or later this could mean competition. He said yes—if Amburgey would pay him more for a set of patterns than Thomas ordinarily received for a finished instrument. Amburgey happily agreed. The next day, Thomas showed up with a set of patterns made from pasteboard, and the deal was made.

  Amburgey said in a 1971 interview that he began to make dulcimers “’long about the last year of high school.” The likely time is therefore the fall of 1919 or the spring of 1920.

  He followed Thomas’s practice of dating and numbering most of his instruments. The earliest Amburgey so far found that has a number and date on a paper label inside the lower left sound hole is no. 18, dated May 16, 1929. This is the instrument beside the Prichard dulcimer in figure 6.1. It belonged to Margaret Motter, a graduate of Hood College and a teacher at Pine Mountain Settlement School from 1928 to 1932. Figure 6.4 shows Amburgey playing one of his dulcimers, and figure 6.5 shows two Am-burgey instruments: no. 90 made in 1938 and no. 467 made in 1961.

  Figure 6.4. Jethro Amburgey playing one of his dulcimers. (Photographer unknown)

  No. 467 is typical of many instruments made by Amburgey as his sales began to increase during the post–World War II folk revival. There is a symmetry problem
in no. 467, and the pre–World War II purfling around the edge of the top is missing. The fretboard is somewhat wider than that of no. 90. The top and bottom are made of a thin laminate plywood. Over a period of time, Amburgey encountered significant problems with having the top and/or bottom panels of his dulcimers split. In the early 1940s, to solve the problem, he shifted to plywood for making the top panels and bottoms of his instruments.

  Figure 6.5. Jethro Amburgey dulcimer no. 90, dated May 9, 1938 (left), and no. 467, dated May 31, 1961. James Still Collection, Morehead State University. (Eric Schindlebower, MSU Photographic Services)

  In a 1963 interview for the Louisville Courier-Journal, Amburgey said, “I’m selling more dulcimers now than I ever thought of selling several years ago. . . . I ship them practically everywhere.” The price at that time was $35.

  Orders continued to flood his mailbox. In February 1971, he made no. 1,191, which, at this writing, is in the possession of a relative, Renee Combs. According to one report, he completed no. 1,369 on November 25, 1971, the day he died, but if this instrument exists, its whereabouts are unknown, and Jethro’s son Morris doubts that the report is correct.

  Jethro Amburgey was a fine player. Morris says that his father used a long piece of paper, folded over several times, as a strummer. Photos taken at Hindman Settlement School also show him picking the strings with his fingers. According to Morris, his dad’s favorite songs were “Barbara Allen” and “Bury Me Beneath the Willow.”