Pick'n Noter Pages
Traditional styles of playing the Appalachian dulcimer and scheitholt before the Folk Revival
Sooner
or later, anybody who plays the Appalachian dulcimer has "the
dulcimer conversation." I usually have it when I'm interpreting
frontier days at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site in Illinois,
and visitors see me sitting in the doorway of a log schoolhouse
going plinkety-twang on a musical instrument like nothing they've
never seen before.
"What's that," they ask.
"A dulcimer," I tell 'em, even though I know what's probably coming next.
"Oh," they say. "A dulcimer. What's that?"
If I had a copy of the New Grove Dictionary of Music handy, I could tell them I'm playing a "partly- or fully fretted zither, derived from north-west European forms some time since the late 18th century in the Appalachian mountains" (Rimmer 1:506). But I don't. So I just say the mountain dulcimer is a home-made musical instrument developed by people like the Virginians, Kentuckians and up-country Carolinians who settled Illinois in the 1820s and 30s. The earliest dulcimer we know of for sure, according to dulcimer historian Ralph Lee Smith, is from the Virginia highlands near Roanoke. It's dated Aug. 28, 1832.
As far as we know, the dulcimer came to the Southern mountains with German-speaking settlers in the Shehandoah Valley. Joe Wilson, director of the National Council for Traditional Arts, says "Swiss-German Anabaptist pacifists from the Palatinate [who] entered the country at Philadelphia and migrated down the 'valley road' through the Shenandoah to both sides of the Blue Ridge in the decades immediately preceding and following the American Revolution." They brought with them a stringed instrument called a scheitholt, which was a forerunner of the concert zither. In time, according to Smith, a journalist and collector who is considered the most knowledgeable historian of dulcimer origins, Scots-Irish settlers in the Virginia highlands heard it and adapted it to the ballads, fiddle tunes and folk hymns of their own musical tradition.
So the dulcimer is an early example of cultural diversity. It's basically a Scots-Irish adaptation of a Pennsylvania German instrument that got to be a part of southern Appalachian culture like apple butter, the Kentucky rifle, sauerkraut and cantilevered barns.
Sometimes you'll hear the Appalachian dulcimer called a "hog fiddle" or a "Tennessee music box." Oldtimers in the Southern mountains usually called it a "dulcimore." And musician and storyteller Mike Anderson of Jacksonville, Ill., has a wonderful tale, embroidered only slightly in the telling, of a tour guide who got confused and called it something that sounded like a "duckslammer." Whatever it's called and whatever its origins, the dulcimer has spread nationwide in the last 25 to 30 years. It's one of the best things to come out of the folk music revival of the 1960s and 70s.
After traditional artists like Jean Ritchie, originally of Viper, Ky., introduced the dulcimer on the Greenwich Village folk music scene, it caught on with California novelist Richard Farina and other folkies on the West Coast. Now you'll hear folks playing Renaissance aires, Bach, blues, ragtime and show tunes as well as the old Appalachian fiddle tunes and play party songs. The new styles of playing are versatile, and folk revival players have taken Southern hill-country tunes like "Gray Cat on a Tennessee Farm" to a nationwide audience. But some of us still like the old way of playing, even if we slip an occasional California-sounding riff into a down-home melody.
On this "Pick'n Noter" site, I'm collecting references to the old ways, along with other notes that might be of interest. The earliest is from Michael Praetorius of Germany, who described a scheitholt in the early 1600s. The most recent -- at the moment -- is from rock critic Colin Escott's book Roadkill on the Three-chord Highway. But that's subject to change: I'm always adding information ...
Next: Some historical notes on the dulcimer
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Also on this website:
Drawing above by W.J. Duncan, Harper's 130 (May 1915): 908. References are listed on the following page.
The contents of this page reflect the work and opinions of the faculty member who constructed it and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Springfield College in Illinois.