Appalachian dulcimer 1830s-style

Editor's note -- This is a story I wrote for The Prairie Picayune, the volunteer newsletter at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site, in September 2000. I'm posting it to the blog, even though it's several years old, because it's a good introduction to some of the writing I do now about playing the Appalachian dulcimer in an 1830s living history village. I'll add links below.

Dulcimer: Home-made Southern upland music

NEW SALEM -- When Appalachian dulcimer players tune up their instruments during a festival at New Salem, they’re playing in a tradition that’s always been part of the Southern highland culture the settlers brought here.

While the instrument itself dates only from about the same time as New Salem [the 1830s], playing the dulcimer is a home-made way of making music as old-fashioned as beating time with a kitchen spoon and as up-to-date as the washtub bass in a down-home bluegrass band. It’s easy to play the dulcimer, too, the old-time way.

Sometimes I’ll tell visitors in New Salem village this is what you did before radio and CDs -- if you wanted music, you made your own. Most of the time, kids will react with the pained tolerance kids usually show when they hear that kind of stuff from adults. But now and then, they’ll nod their heads and say something like, “Cool.”

When I play a dulcimer in the village, I like to use it to interpret the culture brought to New Salem by people like Mentor Graham and the Onstotts of Kentucky, James Rutledge of up-country South Carolina and, of course, Abraham Lincoln. I play the old ballads, fiddle tunes and folk hymns of the Southern mountains, and I talk about Anglo-Celtic musical traditions.

First, a little background.

Technically, the dulcimer is a three-string “fretted zither.” That means it’s played by pressing strings against a fretboard mounted on the body of the instrument. Old-timers used a rod or stick, called a noter, to produce each note on a melody string while they strummed across all three. It’s as easy as picking out a tune on the white keys of a piano.

The mountain dulcimer appears to have evolved in the early 1800s out of a Pennsylvania German zither called the scheitholt. As Germans moved down the hills and up the Wilderness Road in the late 1700s and early 1800s, their scheitholts were adapted to playing fiddle tunes and other Anglo-Celtic music. Out of that adaptation came the dulcimer.

In 1913 a writer for Harper's magazine named William Aspinwall Bradley said a typical Kentucky dulcimer player would note it “by pressing the string nearest him with a bit of reed held in his left hand, while his right hand sweeps all three with a quill or a piece of not too flexible leather. The two strings that are not pressed form a sort of bourdonnement, or drone-bass accompaniment, like a bagpipe. The tonal quality is very light -- a ghostly, disembodied sort of music ...” Most accounts suggest the dulcimer was a solo instrument, kept around home to play hymns, ballads and fiddle tunes.

“Dad always used the old turkey-quill pick,” says Jean Ritchie, who grew up in eastern Kentucky during the 1930s, “and he never seemed to hurry or get excited, even on fast hoe-down pieces, but the music would set even the most religious feet to tapping. ... He used to get the dulcimer down on rainy days when we couldn’t work in the cornfields, or on the soft moonlit evenings out on the porch, after supper, or on long snowy nights around the fireplace, in winter.”

So when I play dulcimer in New Salem village, I like to sit on the steps of my station and use a pick and noter to play fiddle tunes, ballads and old shape-note hymn tunes. When visitors come up, I’ll set the dulcimer aside and interpret the building. If they ask what I’m playing, I’ll explain it’s like the home-made instruments Southern highlanders would have brought into New Salem and played on rainy days or after supper.

If they want to hear more, I’ll tell how the Scots-Irish developed the dulcimer out of the scheitholt. I’ll play a few bars of “Ach du lieber Augustine” and segue into a folk hymn like “Amazing Grace” or a modal fiddle tune like “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” I’ll ask if they hear a drone that sounds a little bit like bagpipes, and I’ll say the music is an expression of the culture of Scots-Irish settlers from the Southern highlands.

Sometimes when older kids look really interested, I’ll ask if they already play an instrument. If they say yes and I think they’ll be careful with mine, I’ll show them how easy it is to play a scale and let them pick out a tune on my dulcimer. “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” maybe, or "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” And when they hear what they’re playing on a new instrument after only a minute, their eyes light up.

Cool. Yeah, I think it’s cool.

Link here for the original of this article on my faculty website, complete with links and Works Cited.

Link here to go to my "Pick and Noter Pages" on historical styles of playing the dulcimer and its predecessor instruments in Germany.

Link below for other posts on my web log about playing folk hymns and other traditional music on the dulcimer:

Gospel Hits of the 1830s? A playlist