Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions

by Ralph Lee Smith

  “HOLLY LEAF” DULCIMERS

  In late 2003, within a few days of each other, I received photographs and descriptions of a type of dulcimer that I had never seen before. California dulcimer collector Carilyn Vice and Mike Kester of Cowpens, South Carolina, both sent photos of and information on dulcimers of a holly-leaf shape. According to information associated with both of the instruments, they date to the mid-19th century. They do not fit conveniently into any of our current information about dulcimer history.

  Figure 8.1. Fretless scheitholt, from the lower Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. (Josie Wiseman)

  Vice’s instrument is shown in figure 8.2. She obtained it on eBay. The seller posted the following information:

  This is a c1850 hand made mountain dulcimer from the Appalachian Mountains. It has three strings with three hand-carved tuners and the frets are made of copper. It is definitely old but in good condition considering its age. The gentleman who hand-carved this dulcimer is no longer with us but he was a native of Burnsville, North Carolina.

  Figure 8.2. Holly leaf–shaped dulcimer from North Carolina. (Carilyn Vice)

  After Vice bought the instrument, she contacted the seller for more information, but the seller’s interest may have declined after the sale was made, and no more details were forthcoming.

  The instrument’s design consists of two concave curves running down the sides, with straight lines running from the holly leaf points to the head and foot. The two left-hand pegs are replacements; the beautiful one on the right, reflecting the holly leaf theme, is probably original.

  I was inclined to discount the seller’s estimate of 1850 for the instrument’s date. But then I received Kester’s photo, shown in figure 8.3, with associated information, which gave me a lot to think about. Kester wrote:

  The basic history of the dulcimer and the family is this. The maker of the dulcimer was James A. Honaker. He is my 4 X grandfather. The last person to play it fluently was my great grandmother, Flossie Kester. My grandfather told me she would play it with two turkey quills, one to pick with and the other as a noter. It was made in the early to mid-1800s in Bland County, Virginia or across the border in Mercer County, West Virginia. If pre-Civil War it was all “Virginia.” This is where my family is from.

  James A. Honaker is better known as a rifle maker. He and his father, Abraham Honaker, were master cap and ball rifle makers. One of Abraham’s is displayed in Williamsburg.

  Figure 8.3. Holly leaf–shaped dulcimer from Virginia/West Virginia. (Mike Kester)

  It is rumored that the holly leaf design came from an instrument of James A’s grandfather. The Honaker family came to America in 1749 as Swiss cabinetmakers. Both father and son of the first generation were Revolutionary War veterans. I have heard there might be other examples in the family but have yet to see them.

  In this instrument’s pattern, reverse curves run from the holly points to the head and foot. The pattern is more sophisticated than that of Vice’s, with the curve of the sides turning convex as it approaches the lower holly points. The two panels have different patterns of sound holes. The ones on the right are larger, more attractive, and closer to the fretboard. One suspects that the left-hand panel is an old replacement. Scrolls and designs cover both panels. A small hole is drilled in the fretboard between the third and fourth frets.

  A strip of wood, ¾ inches high, with two “feet” runs across the underside of the instrument near its head, lifting the head from the surface of the table sufficiently to prevent vibration of the bottom from being dampened.

  These instruments belong to the double-bout hourglass tradition, rather than the Virginia single-bout tradition. The hole drilled into the fretboard of Kester’s dulcimer, however, is found in most single-bout Virginia dulcimers, but not in dulcimers of standard hourglass design. At 27 inches, the instrument’s vibrating string length exceeds the 24–26 inches that is usual for single bout dulcimers, but falls short of the 28 inches that is usual for old hourglass dulcimers.

  All one can say is, we have plenty to learn!

  TENNESSEE MUSIC BOXES

  Allen Smith’s Catalogue of Pre-Revival Appalachian Dulcimers describes five large box-like instruments that were all made or owned in a small area comprising Perry and Lawrence counties in southern middle Tennessee and neighboring Lauderdale County in Alabama, plus several others found or owned farther away. The instruments have four strings, of which two pass over the frets. Three of the instruments are what are now called “courting dulcimers,” with two fretboards on which two facing players can play duets. One owner of a single-fretboard instrument told Smith that her grandmother, who owned it, called it a “music box,” and the instruments have become known as “Tennessee music boxes.”

  Sandy Conatser, a dulcimer enthusiast of Nashville, Tennessee, has taken a special interest in these instruments and has gathered substantial amounts of information about them. She located 48 specimens in addition to the ones described in Smith’s catalogue. Features shared by most of them include:

  use of eyebolts as tuners

  placement of the tuners at the right-hand end of the fretboard

  use of shaped metal plates to form both the nut and the bridge

  extension of the metal plate at the tuning end to cover the strumming area

  Conatser, in collaboration with the late David Schnaufer of Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, published an article describing her findings, entitled “Tennessee Music Box: History, Mystery, and Revival,” in the Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 58, no. 4 (1988). The article, with a number of photographs, has been placed online at http://home.usit.net/ ~sandyc/mb.html.

  Four of the music boxes found by Conatser bear labels, parts of labels, or inscriptions. One label reads:

  The Harmonica

  Mfg. & Sold by

  Echard and Goodman

  No. 239303

  Pat. 1881 Imp. 1886

  Terrell Robinson Goodman, born in Perry County Terrell Robinson Goodman, born in Perry County in 1840, has been identified as one maker, and John Pevahouse, of White Oak Creek in Perry County, has been named by dulcimer collector Richard Hulan as another. There were other makers, and our knowledge remains very incomplete. An unrecorded Tennessee music box turned up on eBay in 2002, and Carilyn Vice bought it. It is illustrated in figure 8.4. It has four eyebolts as tuners, a metal shield over the strumming area, and two octaves designated with the numbers 1 through 7, with a final 1 and 2 at the high end of the frets. The dulcimer is fretted to play the Ionian scale from the open string.

  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

  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. Lyn
ch, 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.”

  COINCIDENCE OR DESIGN TRADITION?

  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?

  SIEGRIST DULCIMERS

  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.

  FLEXIBLE FLYER DULCIMER

  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 occasio
n, 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.

  Figure 8.8. Flexible Flyer dulcimer. (Barbara Seymour; photo by Christine DeGrado)

  CONCLUSION: THE AGE OF DISCOVERY CONTINUES

  In June 2009, I was an instructor at Dulcimer Week at Western Carolina University (WCU), deep in the Smoky Mountains, south and west of Asheville, North Carolina. There is a strip of small shops on the WCU campus, which includes two or three little eateries. About the third day of the Dulcimer Week, I walked into one of these establishments and found four dulcimers, a heart-shaped zither, and an instrument identified as a scheitholt hanging on the wall, all for sale! It turned out that they were owned by a WCU physical education instructor, who had picked them up here and there but whose interest in them had declined.

  The instrument identified as a scheitholt was a type of instrument called a Hungarian zither, which is a member of the family of European fretted zithers that includes the scheitholt. It has a series of diatonic frets running along the straight side of the instrument that faces the player. Inboard of this series of frets is a second series of frets, supplying the halftones that are missing from the outboard diatonic scale. A series of several steps runs along the right-hand side of the instrument, supplying drones of various lengths. This specimen had a well-carved head and was undoubtedly old, not later than the 19th century. The owner had acquired it in, of all places, Kentucky! How did it get there? It was a silent witness to a lot of history.