Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions

by Ralph Lee Smith

  Books referred to in the text are noted with an asterisk. The others listed below are books that have been helpful to me in understanding the world of Appalachia and the history of the dulcimer.

  Abramson, Rudy, and Jean Haskell, eds. Encyclopedia of Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Whatever questions you may have about Appalachia, you will find some information here!

  Blue Ridge Folk Instruments and Their Makers: An Exhibit Organized by the Blue Ridge Institute of Ferrum College, Ferrum, Virginia. 1992. Excellent photographs and text. Contact Blue Ridge Institute, Ferrum College, Ferrum, Virginia, 24088, for information on availability.

  *Boone, Hubert. “De hommel in de Lage Landen” (The Hummel in the Low Countries). Brussels Museum of Musical Instruments Bulletin 5 (1975). This unique publication contains scores of photographs of old European fretted zithers and their players, and even includes pictures of American maker Jethro Amburgey and traditional Tennessee player Lucy Steele.

  Campbell, John C. The Southern Highlander and His Homeland. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921. Reprinted by University of Kentucky Press, 2004, and Kessinger Publishing, 2008. An in-depth description of life in the mountains in the early years of the 20th century.

  *Eaton, Allen H. Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1937.

  England, Rhonda George. “Voices from the History of Teaching: Katherine Pettit, May Stone and Elizabeth Watts at Hindman Settlement School, 1899–1956.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Kentucky, 1990. In my opinion, this thesis leaves something to be desired as a well-argued scholarly work, but it contains lots of fascinating information, including copious selections from the diary of Pettit and the correspondence of Watts.

  *Gifford, Paul M. The Hammered Dulcimer: A History. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2001.

  *Hall, Baynard R. [Robert Carlton, pseud.]. The New Purchase; or, Seven and a Half Years in the Far West. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1843.

  *Henry, Mellinger. Songs Sung in the Southern Appalachians, Many of Them Illustrating Ballads in the Making. London: Mitre Press, 1934.

  Hicks, John Henry, Mattie Hicks, and Barnabas B. Hicks. The Hicks Families of Western North Carolina (Watauga River Lines). Boone, North Carolina, 1991. The late John Henry Hicks spent 25 years compiling this 463-page work.

  Irwin, John Rice. Musical Instruments of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Norris, Tennessee: Museum of Appalachia Press, 1979. This charming item is subtitled, “A history of the author’s collection housed in the Museum of Apppalachia.” The book describes and illustrates a number of old dulcimers, paying as much attention to the owners and players as it does to the instruments. Irwin, proprietor of this privately owned museum, has been collecting mountain artifacts since the 1960s. In 1989, he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius award,” and he and his museum were featured in an article entitled, “Bark Grinders and Fly Minders Tell a Tale of Appalachia,” by Jeannie Ralston, in the February 1996 issue of Smithsonian.

  Isbell, Robert. Ray Hicks: Master Storyteller of the Blue Ridge. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Originally published as The Last Chivaree: The Hicks Family of Beech Mountain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The great merit of this book is the fully rounded portrait that it provides of mountain life in the years before and shortly after World War II, including the ever-present hardship. Ray was a member of the dulcimer-making Hicks family that is described in this book.

  Kincaid, Robert L. The Wilderness Road. Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947. Reprinted by several other publishers. This is the basic account. It doesn’t supplant William Allen Pusey’s book, listed below (nothing could).

  Long, Lucy. “The Negotiation of Tradition: Collectors, Community, and the Appalachian Dulcimer in Beech Mountain, North Carolina.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1995. Fascinating! As for “negotiation” versus “cultural imposition,” my preference is for Long’s approach.

  *Matteson, Maurice. Beech Mountain Folk-Songs and Ballads, Collected, Arranged, and Provided with Piano Accompaniments by Maurice Matteson. Text edited and foreword written by Mellinger Edward Henry. Schirmer’s American Folk-Song Series, Set 15. New York: G. Schirmer, 1936. This book is discussed in the text.

  *McGill, Josephine. Folk-Songs of the Kentucky Mountains. New York: Boosey & Co., 1917.

  Mullins, Mike, Geneva Smith, and Ron Daley, eds. Knott County, Kentucky History and Families, 1884–1994. Paducah, Kentucky: Turner, 1985. Invaluable. A little over a thousand copies were printed, all but a hundred of which were presold before publication. If you missed it, you missed something wonderful. See if you can borrow it from a library on interlibrary loan.

  Pusey, William Allen. The Wilderness Road to Kentucky, Its Location and Features. New York: George H. Doran, 1921. Pusey, a medical doctor, was the great-grandson of William Brown, who traveled the Wilderness Road in 1782 and kept a journal, which has been preserved. In the years 1919 to 1921, Pusey determined the exact location of the road, which was then not fully known, and published the information in this book, with many photographs. The book is wonderful and rare. You will probably pay a good deal for it if you can locate a copy in the secondhand trade, but you should do so with a glad heart. The frontispiece, showing the doctor’s old touring car, with the top down and a 1920 Virginia license plate, parked beside the gravel road in the saddle of Cumberland Gap is worth the price all by itself.

  Raine, James Watt. The Land of Saddlebags: A Study of the Mountain People of Appala-chia. Published jointly by the Council of Women for Home Missions and the Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1924. Reprinted a number of times. Long out of print, but not too hard to find in the secondhand trade. Raine was the head of the English Department at Berea College. The book, based on years of firsthand observation, is beautifully written. It includes several songs and a photograph of a young man playing a Thomas dulcimer with the same kind of sound holes as the 1891 Thomas described in chapter 6.

  Ritchie, Jean. The Dulcimer Book. New York: Oak Publications, 1963. Many reprint-ings. The first book about the dulcimer, and still fresh and wonderful.

  — — — Jean Ritchie’s Dulcimer People. New York: Oak Publications, 1975. Additional information on Ritchie and on the dulcimer scene as it stood at the time of publication.

  Scarborough, Dorothy. A Song Catcher in Southern Mountains: American Folk Songs of British Ancestry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1937. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966. Includes some transcriptions of dulcimer tunes played by a lady named Clara Callaghan of Saluda, North Carolina, about 1932. I have some doubts about this dulcimer material; the tunes and text sound like standard printed British versions. The book as a whole is nevertheless charming.

  *Sharp, Cecil, and Maud Karpeles. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1932. Reprinted in 1952; reprinted in one volume in 1960, 1966, and 1972. Out of print. A selection from this work also appeared as Eighty Appalachian Folk Songs, Collected by Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles (Winchester, Massachusetts: Faber & Faber, 1968), reprinted several times, now out of print. These two English folk-song collectors spent 46 weeks in the mountains in the years 1916–1918, collecting folk songs, and produced one of the greatest of all books about America. For a description of their collecting journey, see Yates et al., below. It should be noted that, after their first collecting season in 1916, they issued a book with the above title, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1917. This book contains less than half the number of songs and ballads, and about one-third the number of tunes, in the Oxford University Press edition. Because the 1917 Putnam edition is out of copyright, it has been reprinted by one or more reprint houses. Buyers should be aware of what they are, and are not, getting.

  *Smith, L. Allen. A Catalogue of Pre-Revival Appalachian Dulcimers. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983. Out of print, and indispensable. T
he first scholarly work on the dulcimer, and the seedbed of all subsequent work.

  Smith, Ralph Lee. The Story of the Dulcimer. Cosby, Tennessee: Crying Creek, 1986. My contribution. Out of print.

  *Smith, Ralph Lee, with Madeline MacNeil. Folk Songs of Old Kentucky: Two Song Catchers in the Kentucky Mountains, 1914 and 1916, with Arrangements for Appalachian Dulcimer. Pacific, Missouri: Mel Bay, 2003. Contains early information on the dulcimer in the Cumberlands.

  * — — — Greenwich Village: The Happy Folk Singing Days, 1950s and 1960s. Pacific, Missouri: Mel Bay, 2008.

  Stoddart, Jess. Challenge and Change in Appalachia: The Story of Hindman Settlement School. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002. A readable, balanced, and immensely interesting account of the school and the settlement, which played important roles in the preservation and dissemination of the dulcimer.

  Warner, Anne. Traditional American Folk Songs from the Anne and Frank Warner Collection. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1984. Wonderful personal recollections of the Hicks family of western North Carolina, whom the Warners visited in 1938, with careful transcriptions of many songs.

  Wilgus, D. K. Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship since 1898. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1959. Reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982. This was Wilgus’s Ph.D. thesis. It contains more about early 20th-century scholarly wrangling over ballads than matters to most people today, but I confess that I enjoyed all of it.

  Williams, Herman K. The First Forty Years of the Old Fiddler’s Convention, Galax, Virginia. N.p., n.d. A highly interesting local production, which includes winners of the dulcimer contests.

  Williams, John Alexander. Appalachia: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. An excellent and highly readable survey.

  Yates, Mike, Elaine Bradke, and Malcolm Taylor. Dear Companion: Appalachian Traditional Songs and Singers from the Cecil Sharp Collection. English Folk Dance and Song Society, in association with Sharp’s Folk Club, 2004. Published some 86 years after Sharp and Karpeles completed their 1916–1918 folk-song-collecting trips through the mountains, this book provides fascinating descriptions of their journey and experiences. It includes many photographs taken of his mountain informants by Sharp. A must-have for every Appalachian music lover’s library.

  About the Author

  Ralph Lee Smith is a leading authority on the history of the dulcimer and of traditional Appalachian music. His books include The Story of the Dulcimer, Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions, Songs and Tunes of the Wilderness Road, and Folk Songs of Old Kentucky, the latter two with Madeline MacNeil as musical collaborator. His recordings include Across the Blue Ridge, another collaboration with Madeline MacNeil. Smith has taught Traditions courses in annual Dulcimer Week programs at Appalachian State University and Western Carolina University and is codirector of the annual Dulcimer Week at Shenandoah University. He holds a B.A. in English from Swarthmore College and an M.Ed. from the University of Virginia.