Only 10 to go till 200 members
OFF TOPIC discussions
The next new member will be #400.The next big FOTMD virtual food party might include blackeyed peas. It's a New Year thang.Anyway, happy New Year --Dick
Forum Activity for @razyn
Only 10 to go till 200 members
OFF TOPIC discussions
Here's some individually wrapped leftover Halloween candy -- not everybody on FOTMD is so @#$% healthy...
Only 10 to go till 200 members
OFF TOPIC discussions
In case y'all aren't counting, it's almost time for the 300-member international picnic and dulcimer jam.Pickles and cookies, hmm... what else would be good with that?Dick
Carson Turner said:
There's a story out there from another musical experiment wherein Joshua Bell went busking in DC with his $2,000,000 strad violin.Here's a version of the Joshua Bell story that ran in the Washington Post (Sunday Magazine): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html Another thing you learn is that Metro stations get a big volume and turnover of pedestrian traffic -- but almost all of the people are rushing somewhere.Dick
I have a ten-string one, but it's not large. About 20" long. It's very nicely made, by Edward and Anne Damm of Bar Harbor, ME, in 1977. Soundhole cutout is a fairy. It has a case, tuning wrench, some extra strings, and a couple pages of instructions. If anybody wants it, I could be talked out of it -- I never play the thing. Bought it on a whim, some years ago.I used to hang out with Finns a lot more than I do now. But I still wear the purple on St. Urho's Day!Dick
Any banjo players out there?
Adventures with 'other' instruments...
I don't play very often, but I started a long time ago. I have a few old banjos, say 1870-1900 or so, with and without frets -- and one reproduction "minstrel" banjo, made within the past ten years (an eBay coup de foudre). I've been to the Antietam Early Banjo Gathering, twice, and really enjoy the fellowship of those guys even though many of them are certifiable (i.e., dedicated Civil War reenactors). There's a Ning group for Minstrel Banjo, and I was lurking in it about a year before Strumelia started this dulcimer one.My best banjo is an open back S.S. Stewart "Universal Favorite" tenor (a Nashville pawn shop purchase) that Homer Ledford converted to a 5-string for me. He added his special tone ring, as well as making the new birdseye maple neck (fitted with the old inlays), in 1966. One of the earlier Ledford banjos, I guess. He didn't sign it or anything, but I have letters from him when we arranged for it. I swapped him a nice early Washburn mandolin he wanted -- didn't pay actual money for the conversion, but he costed it out at $75. (More than I had paid for his standard dulcimer, in 1963.) I also got Pete Seeger to autograph it, when he did a workshop in Nashville around 1968 -- so now I can't change the dang head. Mike Seeger also played it, not long after that -- guess I should have asked him to write on it too, but we were actually friends, so that just seemed odd.Back in the day, about 1915-20 when Uncle Dave Macon was a wagoner and there was not yet a radio show in Nashville (the Grand Ole Opry), my paternal grandfather was one of his employers. (I just checked the Wikipedia article about Uncle Dave, and it discusses The Macon Midway Mule and Wagon Transportation Company.) So my dad and my grandmother had some anecdotes about him. I knew two of his sons, but he had died when I was about twelve -- and he had long since been a professional entertainer, rather than a wagoner. I got into folk music a few years later. I do have a banjo that Uncle Dave broke in about 1892, when he fell off a friend's porch in Lascassas. He gave it to the boy who lived there -- who got the broken neck fixed, and about 70 years later I bought it from him. And I also got some good banjo tunes from him (Elbert F. Pilkington).Dick
Dulcimer or Guitar?
General mountain dulcimer or music discussions
That's just the regular Swiss Army noter, I think.Dick
How did you first discover the mountain dulcimer?
General mountain dulcimer or music discussions
Patrick O'Brien said:
he said yea there was a feller up the holler from his home place had one sumptin like it,I'd kinda like to know where in WV his home place was. A bunch of O'Briens and their kin are in Gerald Milnes' book "Play of a Fiddle," but as your dad said, they were playing fiddles and other stuff besides dulcimers. Milnes does discuss (p. 139) bowed zitters or "scheitholts" that were played in WV.Dick
only it was slimer and he played it with a bow but he dident recall what he called it.This would a been about 1924 or so.
How did you first discover the mountain dulcimer?
General mountain dulcimer or music discussions
The most costly four bits I ever spent:(Initially, this is pasted in from the ED forum, where it was buried in a Scheitholt thread in the summer of 2007.)"I was a freshman at Vanderbilt in 1957. One of the first things I bought in the campus bookstore was Richard Chase's paperback, American Folk Tales and Songs, which was new in 1956. [My copy is the first printing, and the cover price was 50 cents.] In the back, it said, ask the old people in your family if they know anything like this... I did, they did, etc. When I sent one of the songs to him (Banner Elk, NC) he sent back a postcard telling me to share it with John Putnam, who was in grad school across the street at Peabody. John also wrote one of the early dulcimer history/method booklets (later), published at Berea College. And we were friends until he died, about 20 years ago."That's all I said on the other forum. But I should also mention that the song I sent to Mr. Chase was "Old maids, old maids, all ragged and dirty, You'd better get married before you are thirty," which my great-aunt Launa had told me she sang at the age of fourteen while playing the (hammered) dulcimer that my grandfather-to-be had made, and brought with him while courting her sixteen year old sister. This tale was told with a serious twinkle in her eye, since her sister (my grandmother) was also in the room, at the time. They were crocheting; I was interviewing my older relatives -- per Chase (1956), pp. 228-30, "Amateur Collector's Guide."So, that's when I heard about the hammered dulcimer; I eventually learned that my grandfather and two of his brothers had made these instruments in the 1890s and sold them in the lower Cumberland valley, mostly to the north and west of Nashville. I never found one of theirs, but I did get my first Cumberland valley hammered dulcimer in 1966 -- and many others after that. I think the most HDs I owned was 12, maybe 13 (not all at one time), by about 1970. I used to clean up an old one (they never cost more than $50), give it new strings, show someone the rudiments of how to play, and sell it for about $15 profit (and it was still well under $100). This hobby was more like salvage archaeology than a business.But this is a "Mountain Dulcimer" forum. I'm not sure whether anyone in my family even knew what that was, before I met John Putnam in the winter of 1957-58. He had a couple in his dormitory, and those were the first I ever saw. And played. I saw Tennessee Music Boxes in 1963 (the first was a "whatsit?" written up in the Elmer Hinton column of the Nashville Tennessean newspaper; I answered that query, and also tracked down the owner of the one illustrated). But I didn't find a TMB for sale until the summer of 1964. The first MD I owned was Homer Ledford's #738, bought at his home (after some correspondence with John Putnam, and then with Homer) with my Christmas money at the end of December, 1963.Getting back to my "four bits" topic: seeds sewn by the perfidious Richard Chase continued to grow. I dabbled in folklore for several years -- and also managed to stay in school, for most of them -- until one day I discovered, to my horror, that I had become an academic folklorist. This is not a wise career move. Luckily, I had married much more wisely. We had a nice little collection of American folk instruments -- which mostly went into storage, while our kids grew up. For a couple of years now (since I'm and old coot, and our kids are the ones who have to protect their instruments from little boys), I've been writing about our older mountain dulcimers on ED.And we do occasionally still play them.Dick