Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions

by Ralph Lee Smith

  All buyers of Amburgey dulcimers, from the beginning to the end, received a genuine old-time Cumberland dulcimer in the original Thomas pattern. Amburgey always used the old short frets and string spacing that Thomas had been using a hundred years earlier, and no 6½ fret ever put in an appearance on his fretboard. Today, all Amburgey dulcimers are windows onto a vanished past.

  DULCIMERS AND THE “POLITICS OF CULTURE”

  It is a bit difficult to believe that there could be such a subject as the “politics of dulcimers,” but in fact there is. It is a subset of a lively field of academic debate that goes under the name of the “politics of culture.”

  In essence, proponents of the politics-of-culture critique of society assert that people belonging to the nation’s power elite who were ostensibly involved in helping less powerful social groups such as Appalachian mountaineers and Native Americans actually imposed their own notions and values on these cultures. Hard-liners say that these “helpers” gave crumbs to the disadvantaged, virtually as part of a conspiracy with other advantaged groups to fleece the parties that were ostensibly being helped. Proponents of these views often believe in the broad explanatory power of a model of society whose predominating feature is a one-way street on which oppressors work their will on the oppressed.

  Applying the critique to Hindman Settlement School and its interest in the dulcimer, critics offer the view that the administrators and teachers at Hindman did one or both of two things: They imposed prevailing upper-class cultural values on the mountain children and their parents, and/or they kept the mountaineers tranquilized with quaint things like dulcimers while the coal barons robbed them.

  With regard to dulcimers, critics state that the administrators of the school chose the dulcimer over the banjo for priority in Hindman’s activities because they preferred its gentility to the rowdy songs and social settings with which the banjo was associated. This constitutes what poli-tics-of-culture advocates call cultural imposition.

  Analysis of the Politics-of-Culture Arguments

  We can begin by acknowledging two facts. First, romantic attitudes toward the Appalachian mountain people were widely prevalent among the nation’s more literate and educated classes during the first half of the 20th century, and the dulcimer became associated with these romantic ideas. Second, these notions were often related to a belief in the racial superiority of native Anglo-Saxon stock over that of people from other nations and cultures.

  Mountaineers were seen as sharing in that intrinsic superiority. Although currently in reduced circumstances, they were nevertheless “cousins of Lincoln.” Folklorists such as Jean Thomas and novelists such as John Fox Jr.—in his book The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, published in 1903 and one of the first American books to sell over a million copies— couldn’t find flowery enough language to describe these highland sons and daughters of Merrie Englande. For that matter, neither could Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the West.

  It followed that mountaineers had dropped behind the procession simply as a result of unfortunate historical accidents. All they needed to take their rightful place among America’s Mayflower families and power elite was a decent education and a bit of opportunity. Educated and empowered, they might even serve as a welcome bulwark against the tide of foreign immigration.

  Much of this dithering is silly, and plenty of it is reprehensible. With all these things granted, there remain ample grounds to believe that the class-struggle model of the politics of culture will produce results that are hardly an improvement in terms of accurately describing what really happens. The model of an all-powerful segment of society working its cultural will on groups that cannot resist combines sympathy for the allegedly powerless people with a condescendingly low opinion of their capability for relating to external cultural forces in their environment.

  Folklorist Lucy Long, in her Ph.D. thesis “The Negotiation of Tradition” cited in the preceding chapter, is among many scholars who believe that the cultural-imposition model is flawed. The model, she believes, “tends to portray Appalachian culture as adulterated by outside intervention. The interactions between outsiders and mountain natives, however, have always been a two-way dialogue.” In contact between cultures, an interaction occurs in which both sides act and both possess leverage. Negotiation, not imposition, Long believes, is the concept that produces the most comprehensive and accurate description of what occurs in the interaction.

  The Dulcimer and Banjo at Hindman

  The belief that Hindman was biased against the banjo, and that its special interest in the dulcimer illustrates cultural imposition, runs into problems with the record. The banjo was in fact present and welcome at Hindman. In 1907, for example, at Katherine Pettit’s suggestion, a teenage student named Ada B. Smith played “Barbara Allen” for visitors, accompanying herself on a homemade banjo. An old photograph shows four Hindman students with dulcimers and a fifth with a gourd banjo. Bias is hard to detect in statements such as the following, from Pettit’s diary:

  Some of the people thought it was wrong to have any kind of music but meetin’ house songs. We mistakenly asked a young man to bring his banjo and give us some mountain music. A good sister hastened to urge us not to have “banjo pickin’” and said some of the people were saying that we could not be good if we liked it.

  7 Dulcimer Makers of the Folk Revival Transition

  Dulcimer Makers of the Folk

  Revival Transition

  As the post-World War II folk revival began to gather momentum in the 1950s, awareness of the dulcimer spread rapidly in urban centers throughout the country. In Appalachia, several makers whose early dulcimers had been purely traditional modified their instruments to relate to the needs and wants of the growing ranks of new urban players and succeeded in developing markets. Changes included:

  substituting modern instrument fretting for old-style staple frets

  securing fully accurate fret patterns

  inserting a 6½ fret in their fretboards

  utilizing an increasing variety of woods

  using woods of contrasting colors for the back, sides, top, and fret-boards of their instruments

  These refinements were made to basic patterns that derived directly from old and early traditions, and that remained fully recognizable when the makers had finished their modifications. These makers represent the final chapter of the story of the traditional dulcimer in the Appalachians. It is a wonderful last chapter.

  HOMER LEDFORD (1927-2006)

  Homer Ledford of Winchester, Kentucky, modified the old Cumberland dulcimer pattern in a number of ways over a period of years and carried it into the folk revival.

  Ledford was born in 1927 in Ivyton, Tennessee, in the north-central part of the state, about 30 miles south of the Kentucky line. His father was a farmer; Homer was one of four children. His world was mountainous, with swinging bridges across crystal-clear streams. “We had a pretty hard time, you might say, as children,” Ledford said as we sat and talked in the parlor of his modest home on the day after Christmas in 1992. “We didn’t have a lot.”

  When Ledford was 12, his brother joined the Civilian Conservation Corps to bring in a little money for the family. “We finally got enough money to buy a battery radio,” Ledford says. “We listened to the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night until the battery went dead.”

  Sometime around 1938, when Ledford was about 11 years old, he made his first musical instrument—a fiddle—out of a dynamite box, which he covered with matchsticks. It turned out that the glue that he ordered from a mail-order company wasn’t very good, though, and the matchsticks fell off. In 1946 he tried again. He had read in the Sears Roebuck catalogue that fiddles were made of curly maple. He cut a piece from an old maple tree that grew in his father’s hog lot, dried it in his mother’s cookstove, and this time made a fiddle that stayed together and worked fine.

  In 1946, after high school, Ledford received a scholarship to attend the John C. Campbell Folk School in
Brasstown, North Carolina, while he recuperated from rheumatic fever. Then as now, the Campbell Folk School interested itself in mountain traditions, skills, and crafts. The school offered short courses in vegetable dyeing, pottery, folk dancing, folk singing, storytelling, and similar subjects that could be used in recreational programs at schools and colleges. Ledford remained at Campbell off and on for two and a half years. There he learned about dulcimers and made his first instruments.

  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.

  LEONARD GLENN (1910–1997) AND CLIFFORD GLENN (1935– )

  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 f
ashion,” 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.

  Banjos and Dulcimers

  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.