Interviews by Jerry L. Wright

Interview with Charles Whitmer

While Charles was at our house during October, I got the following information from him.

 My musical endeavors began in 1969 when I began playing the saxophone in school in the 6^th grade.  I played all through high school and majored in saxophone as my major instrument in undergraduate school at the University of Houston.. It was during my final years in undergraduate school where I was first exposed to an autoharp as I had never seen one to my knowledge.  We were taught how to tune them and use them in elementary school general music classes.  I had no idea at the time that it was even possible to play a melody on one and I had no knowledge of the history and usage of it in traditional music.  During my final year of undergraduate school and for a year after I graduated, I basically forgot about the autoharp and did not pay much attention to it. 

An accident led me to that autoharp.  Literally.  During the first year after graduating from college I did not go into teaching right away.  I worked in the grocery store business as I spent 7 years in the produce area of the business during high school and college.

One day while picking up a 50 lb sack of carrots in a cooler I felt a sharp jabbing pain which turned out to be a type of a hernia on my lower abdomen.  Needless to say, I had to have an operation to fix it.  After such an operation, I found that for about 7 weeks I could not play my saxophone nor even sit up to play any type of piano.  After about 3 weeks of total boredom recuperating and desperately missing playing some sort of a musical instrument, I remembered the autoharp from music teaching methods class and decided that I’d get one.  My first one was the 27 chord Caroler from Rhythm Band, Inc.  I managed to find Meg Petersorts method book and began to try to learn her material and techniques but found it difficult since I still had never seen anyone actually play one producing melodies. 

I soon bought an Oscar Schmidt “Centurion” model and began to seriously seek out more information on the autoharp.  Meg’s’ book mentioned the term “Bluegrass Music” which was foreign to me as I had never heard of it as a fold tradition.  The only time that I remember hearing the word “Bluegrass” was once when I was in high school.

In my quest to find more about the autoharp, I happened to buy a copy of Frets magazine, which was for acoustic string instruments.  Since Meg’s book mentioned Bluegrass music it, I sought out somewhere to find this elusive Bluegrass music.

In the events listings I spotted an ad that said that there would be a Bluegrass festival in Bronson, Texas.  I did not know where that was located, but I was determined to go there to find Bluegrass music and hopefully find someone who could show me more about playing the autoharp.  When the weekend arrived I headed up to deep East Texas where this festival was being held and found the town to be a ghost town in the piney woods region of the state; nonetheless, the festival was a wonderful experience.

When I got there I marveled at all of the campers and proceeded to get a spot for my tent and I found out beforehand that camping is what was usually done at these events. 

The first evening there I saw people getting out string instruments and playing together…..without sheet music!!!!!!    As a classically trained musician I found this to be fascinating as I had never been exposed to this type of phenomenon.  I got out my autoharp and roamed around the campground in hopes of finding an autoharp player as my skills at that time were very basic and was self taught and I knew that my self teaching was falling way short of what the possibilities probably were.  I got favorable receptions from most of the other musicians and everyone seemed to know what this instrument that I had was, but alas I found no other autoharp players at the festival.  It was there where I first heard of the Carter family as that is who everyone there seemed to associate the autoharp with all weekend.  It was an enjoyable experience nonetheless.

Later that year or the next, I found myself taking an annual pilgrimage see the autumn colors in the Ozarks Mountains of northern Arkansas.  I had always stayed in the extreme northwest corner of the state, but something led me to venture a little farther east that usual that year.  Lo and behold, I found myself in Mountain View, Arkansas and had no idea as to what I had stumbled upon.  I went to a concert at the Ozark Folk Center the evening I was there and it was there I saw my first “real live” autoharp player; Ron Wall.

Ron was living in Mountain View at the time and was a regular performer there.  I was mesmerized with what I saw and heard him do with the autoharp.  After his performance I rushed backstage to try to have him show me up close what he was doing on the autoharp.  He was very friendly and he did in fact show me what he did and I tried to retain what I saw in order to start to develop my playing skill.

A lot has happened since then.  Presently, I am on staff with the Ozark Folk Center in Mountain View, AR to teach three different weeks of autoharp in the summer as well as teach during the folk center’s Autoharp Jamboree.  I have also become a regular at the Summer Acoustic Music Festival in Houston in the summer and the Lone Star State Dulcimer Society’s Winterfest in the winter.  Other venues do come up as I still teach at the Augusta Heritage Workshops in Elkins, WV when asked as well as other festivals as the need arises whenever I can do them. 

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Interview with John Huron: Banjo and Dulcimer Maker

 I was a Civil War re-enactor wanting to do it all as authentically as possible.  I would sit around the camp fire in the evening with a friend of mine who played the banjo.  Doug played a banjo that was made in the 1920’s but it was not what was played during the war.  It had frets on the neck.  The Civil War banjo was fretless.

            Then I visited the visitor’s center on the Blue Ridge Parkway up around Asheville.  There I discovered the Foxfire books.  In Foxfire 3 I found a fretless banjo.  Through a man that I worked with, I met Ellis Wolfe who live up on Doe Mountain.  Ellis was a friend of Stanley Hicks who was featured also in Foxfire 3.   Stanley also built “them delcimors,” as he called them.  Stanley had given Ellis his old patterns for the fretless banjo. 

            Ellis was more than willing to tell me everything that I wanted to know.  It took several trips up there because I had to come home and work on what I had learned.  He liked that because it kept me coming back.  Being up there with him was a very rewarding time for me. 

            The wood store that I was going to told me that I needed to go down and visit with Robert Mize who builds dulcimers.  They said that I needed to see if I could get some wood from him.  Mr. Mize is in Foxfire 3. 

            I soon learned that Mr. Mize never met a piece of wood that he didn’t like.  After awhile, Mr. Mize said, “I’ll tell you what.  I’m not going to sell you this wood, but I will give you a piece.  I’ve got some sassafras lumber that is thick enough that you can make this instrument out of it. 

            Since that day, Mr. Mize and I have become good friends.  He taught me to build dulcimers and has helped me in my newly found vocation in too many ways to count. 

            My dulcimer pattern and construction techniques were passed to me by Robert Mize, who got them from Homer Ledford, who got them from J. Edward Thomas. 

            I know some guys who shoot groundhogs.  Every once in a while I will go up there and come back and fill up my freezer with ground hogs.  I skin them and tan the hides on the side of the house.  I probably have the only tannery in Bristol, Tennessee.  Groundhogs aren’t bad eatin’ either if you cook them right.  The banjo head is made from a fairly thin groundhog hide. 

            I’m real fund of cherry wood but I also use walnut and sassafras to make the banjos.  The mountain banjo is my favorite instrument because of the idea that the old pattern was handed down to me.  I build them exactly like Ellis built them, and Ellis built them exactly like Stanley, and Stanley built them like his dad, and his dad.  I feel like I am the one who is now keeping it alive.  I’m hoping that when I get up into my seventies, some city boy will stumble into my shop and take a liking to this line of work. 

            I wasn’t born in the right place, but I had some old mountain genes inside me that kind of directed me down this way, and there was a good bit of direction from above, too.  Sometimes, you know, it pays you to listen.

 d

Lloyd got a fretless banjo for Christmas made by John.  This summer on our vacation, we spent an evening with John and his lovely wife, Sandy.  John’s shop is in the basement under his house.  We learned that the banjo that he made after Lloyd’s is in the Smithsonian.  The next day we spent with Robert Mize.  I helped Mr. Mize assembly dulcimer number 3446.

            You can reach John Huron by calling 615/764-3332.  He makes fine dulcimers and banjos. 

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Interview with Sam Stone

 It was in the cool of the morning in Covington, Louisiana.  Sam Stone and I moved out into the warm sunshine.  Sam was born and grew up in the environs of Jeffersonville, Indiana.  His parents were from the Borden Valley of Clark County.  Sam talked and I listened:

 I am Sam Stone from Henryville, Indiana.  Well, I grew up in Jeffersonville, which was about 20 miles away from where I live now.  Then I went away to college and I was in the Navy then I lived up in northern Indiana around Fort Wayne for about 35 years.  And then when I retired, I moved back down home again.   I am married to Daisy.  I am 70 years old.

  How did I get involved in writing songs and singing?  Life does that to you. 

You don’t start out with any intention of doing these things.  I studied classical piano when I was young and had all these dreams of someday being a modern Chopin.  But when I got into college, got involved in other things, and the first thing you know, I just dropped the piano and went years without playing any music.  Then oh, when I was in my 50’s, I was down in Cosby, Tennessee, I ran into Jean Schilling.  Jean and Lee were playing up there in a National Park, in the mountains there.  I was looking at that dulcimer she was playing and I went over there and talked to her afterwards.  And she said, “Come by, just stop by.”    And she told me where they lived.  So I stopped by and she sold me my first dulcimer and gave me my first lesson.  That would have been in about ’82 and so now that is kinda my home base and I go back to Cosby every year and sit on her front porch and play music.  At their festival, I am known as their front porch picker. 

            I just picked it up to play with it and the first thing you know, it becomes another vocation.     The first time I ever wrote a tune, I think I was three years old.  They wanted me to sing a song and I sang Little Jack Horner.  They said that it doesn’t have a tune and I said, “Well, I’ll make one up.”  And so I just made up a tune so I could sing it but I couldn’t tell you what it was like because I can’t remember it. 

            In High School I wrote poetry and felt like writing songs.  I picked up the nickname of the Bard of Henryville because I like writing poetry.  We are in the Louisville area.  I belong to the Louisville Dulcimer Club and the Indianapolis Dulcimer Club.  Right outside Louisville is Bardstown, which is the location of the Old Kentucky Home.  Steven Foster -–there is a big Steven Foster Theater tthere and they called him the Bard.  So down in that area, people just kind of gave me the nickname of the Bard of Henryville.  It’s an area thing.  I never wrote any serious songs until in the 80”s.  I wrote a poem and Judy Morningstar with the Michigan Roughwater Band, her husband is the director of it and she play hammer dulcimer  and other instruments.  And she is a songwriter.  And she saw one of my poems and she said, “Put that to music.”  So I went home and played around and I put it to music and Yesterdays’ Treasures which is still kinda my signature piece.  I put it to music and sent it back to her.  And she wrote back and said, “It’s a lovely poem.”  So I knew she didn’t like the tune.  I sit around and played around and wrote a second tune to it and sent it back and she wrote back and said, “That is a lovely song.”  Then I knew I had it so that song is still kinda my signature.  So I just started writing songs.  I don’t write song intentionally.  Just when you’re playing, tunes come to you and I’ve written tune and said, “I’m not going to put any words to that.” and later I think I need words to it.            

            Every year I write a new Christmas song and fix it up fancy and send them out as Christmas cards.  I started out sending them to my friends but the list keeps growing because people keep wanting on the list.  And I’m sending out somewhere around 200 of them now. It gets to be an expensive thing but I just like doing it.  Yes, I do that every year.  I don’t know how many more years I’m going to do it. 

            We will drive any number of miles almost to go to a festival.  I play at the Indiana State Fair every year.  I play with Tull, he goes there.  We play with a band at the Indiana State Fair.  And around that area I do an awful lot of schools, churches and retirement homes.    I always would just hang around the festivals, I don’t consider myself a mainliner.  I’m not one of the big performers.   When I do get to play, I enjoy doing it and I have to admit, it does help sell things.

            Maureen Sellers is a lovely lady, she lives close to me.  In fact I go over there, she has a laser printer so I use her printer to print my stuff.  Her husband, Bill, is a friend.  She started hanging around the music world.  She followed Tull and I around to watch us I guess.  She says       she watched us to pick up tricks.  So now she is out on the circuit herself.  She would always be at festivals where we were and she would always come and sit by us and watch us play and she would play with us.  She became a friend.  Every year I put on a Sassafras jam – I live on Sassafras Hill.  We have musicians from Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee – they all gather there.  I live out in the country.  They all come there and they bring trailers and campers and spend the weekend, we just make music.  So Maureen, I call her – my wife is my official hostess and Maureen is the unofficial hostess.  She comes and helps do some of the work. 

            If you are a new dulcimer player and want to learn, just sit down and make music.  Sit down and make music.  When I got my dulcimer, Jean kinda showed me how it worked.  I had played the piano, which helped.  I was in Marion, Indiana at the time and not one soul in that whole area knew what a dulcimer was.  So I had to sit down and just learn how it worked.  I took the basic things that she taught me and just sat down and played with it.  I think it took me at lease a month before I could do anything that sounded like music.  I didn’t care – I just sat and played.  And I think you have to do that.  You have to go through that period.  A lot of people will pick it up and they will set it down and say, “I can’t do that.”  You might, for your family’s sake, go off some place alone.  I drove my wife crazy.  It’s like riding a bicycle, it really is like riding a bicycle, it’s a feeling.  It is nothing that anybody can tell you – it’s a feeling – I think it is.   I fell off a bicycle a lot of times before I learned to ride.  It is the same with the dulcimer – you just have to do it and one day you’re sitting there.  I was at my daughter’s house.  I was there just playing and I quit cerebrallizing – quit thinking about it and just sat there and started strumming it.  And she said, “That sounds pretty good,”  and that was the first time that I had ever played anything that sounded like music.  You just have to let yourself go and let the dulcimer make music.

 You may want to order Dancing the Indiana Waltz by Sam Stone.  Dave Para and Cathy Barton are also featured on the CD.  Dave and Cathy will be at Glen Rose this year.  Tull Glazener is also on the CD playing his mountain dulcimer. 

 Sassafras Productions

808 Castetter Road

Henryville, IN 

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 Interview with Larry Barringer

I met Larry Barringer in the Fall of 1994 at a North Harris County Dulcimer Society meeting.  We had attended a couple of meetings but didn’t really know anyone.  Then I spotted a pickin stick and wanted one.  Someone told me that I needed to talk to Larry Barringer.  I remember walking up and introducing myself.  I told him that I didn’t play anything but wanted a pickin stick to mess around with.  In November 1994, we drove over to the Barringer residence and I picked up my pickin stick. 

Since that evening, I have had long conversations with Larry but I had never written anything down.  Now Larry and Sylvia are “full timers” (that means they live in a RV and move around at will) so we don’t get to see them as often.  Then I learned that they were coming back to Houston for a couple of weeks.  On Sunday, November 9^th, the NHCDS had a play at Armond Bayou.

  Now if you aren’t familiar with Armond Bayou, let me tell you a little about it.  It is located down around the NASA / Clear Lake area, south of Houston.  The site is an old farmhouse and surroundings.  The barns, outbuildings, garden and house lend itself to our music and memories of days gone by.  There were folks making syrup, a saddle maker, blacksmith, old poppin’ John engines and many other crafts.  We were playing next to an old barn.  Larry moved his stool over next to mine, I used Lloyd’s mandolin case as a desktop and I got the following interview with Larry Barringer.   

 “I am from upper state New York.  Sylvia is from Ashokan, New York which is right down the road from where I lived.  Jay Ungar wrote Ashokan Farewell, which was made popular in the PBS series about the Civil War. 

About 30 years ago, Sylvia and I spent a weekend on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  We stopped in a craft store and saw  a dulcimer there.  I was very interested in it but they wanted $75 for it so I decided to go home and build one myself.  I got a pattern from an old man in Stanton, Virginia. 

I made one.  Then shortly thereafter, I made two more.  I couldn’t play so I just hung them on the wall.  Then in 1985, we met Arlean Leech in Mountain View, Arkansas.  Arlene said she was a dulcimer teacher and invited us to her house in Houston.   At that time we were living in Houston and working for G.E.  

I showed up at Arlene’s house with a dulcimer that I had made from a McSpadden kit.  Not long after that, the North Harris County Dulcimer Society was formed.  Then I started building dulcimers from scratch and I was buying my wood from Folkcraft.  I soon learned that I could cut my own wood cheaper than ordering it from Folkcraft. 

Then we were traveling up to Virginia and I decided to stop off in Blountville, Tennessee and visit with Robert Mize.  I stopped in town and called him.  I had never met him.  He asked me where I was.  I told him and he drove over and led us back to his house.  I was going to spend about an hour.  Well, three hours later, we were backing out of the driveway and I was rolling up my window – he was still talking. 

That started a friendship.  We went to Boone with them one year and that is where we met Susan Trump.  We also went to the Carter Fold with them.  Then three years ago, we met John Huron through Bob. 

In 1987 we were in upper state New York on a business trip and saw a strum stick, which was made by Bob McAnally in a craft store.  I went home and made one from memory.  The name strum stick is copyrighted so I call mine a pickin’ stick.  It took a couple of tries before I made one like I wanted.  I sold one to a lady who took it to Ireland.  I sold one to Jan Goodsight who wrote about it in the Dulcimer Players News.    

We have met so many interesting people and so many interesting things have happened to us because of the instruments and the music.  One day I was riding down a road and ended up selling a dulcimer to a Forest Ranger.   

b       

I received my first pickin’ stick from Larry in November 1994.  We then played in public for the first time at the NCDS Christmas Party.  Then in April 1995, Larry gave me the pickin stick that I now play.

When Larry and Sylvia became full timers, Larry turned his entire dulcimer building business over to Terry McCafferty.  I am “keeping”  all of his tools.  Of course I have to keep them running until Larry wants to start making dulcimers again.  These are great folks who have been very inspirational to us.  Some day I hope you all will get to meet Larry and Sylvia Barringer.

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Interview with Don Pedi          

     I saw Don Pedi and observed him strumming his dulcimer before I actually heard him play.  His right arm and hand are in constant motion, not like anything I have ever seen.  It was my first time to Covington, he was jamming with a small group between pavilion and the main building.   I moved a little closer.  His left hand was equally active and again, unlike anything I’ve ever seen.  He was using his thumb, index and middle fingers.  By Saturday night, I was absolutely fascinated with Don Pedi.  Later we purchased a tape from him.  I mentioned the fact that we were going to Tennessee and North Carolina for our 1997 vacation.  He told us to come by and visit with him. 

                In June, we were in Chucky, Tennessee - birthplace of Davy Crockett.  Marshall, N.C. was not far away so I called the Pedi residence.  His wife told me that he was in Mars Hill for a festival and would be there all week.  We crossed the state line and over the mountains and headed for Mars Hill, a beautiful little North Carolina town in the mountains just north of Asheville.  We learned they were having an Old Time Music Festival at Mars Hill College.  I wasn’t long before we spotted that familiar light colored cap and white beard.  He was sitting in the middle of fiddle players playing his dulcimer. We watched and listened for a few minutes that left to get something to eat.  We came back for the concert that evening.  After the concert we finally met Don again.  He invited us to a jam.  This time the “big guns” came out.  Alice Gerrard was there with her fiddle.  I had never heard music like this.  Don was right at home.  It seemed the fiddles and other instrument respected him and his dulcimer as much as he did them.  We soon put our instruments away, that is but Lloyd.  He hung on the best he could. 

                Over the next couple of days we talked on the phone and once again in a park in Asheville.    Don was raised in Boston, he often saw Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the coffee houses.  One night he went to hear Judy Collins but Richard Farina was there instead.  Richard is married to Mimi, sister of Joan Baez.  Richard played the dulcimer and Don really like it.  That was in 1964.  In 1965, Don heard Frank Profit and Doc Watson and loved the fiddle tunes. 

                Don moved around a lot.  He spent some time in Colorado and was even at Woodstock.  He did visual art and illustrations.  In 1968 he was with some friends on a beach in Maine.  The friend had a dulcimer and Don got to hold it.  Someone told him about Edd Presnell and Don ordered a dulcimer from him.  In 1971, Don met Jean Richtie.  In 1974, he moved to Asheville. 

                Don is a DJ for a public radio station in Asheville, a carpenter, does graphic art and teaches Tao.  He calls Tao a healing exercise that becomes a martial art when done faster. 

                Don has never played with dulcimers, he plays with fiddles.  He loves the old time fiddle tunes.  He was quite surprised when he learned that the dulcimer players in Texas liked him so much.   That day in the park in downtown Asheville was awesome.                                         Jerry L. Wright

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Interview with David Lindsey

 Saturday night at the 4^th Annual Dulcimer Retreat in Huntsville, David and I sat on a couch in the Bluebonnet Room of the University Hotel.  The jammers were playing in the background.  David gave me the following information.  It is long but you need to read it.  Pay attention to how a man found something that touched his heart.  With no previous training, he chased the thing that touched him so.  It was not easy.  But now, years later, he plays in the Sweet Song String Band and makes hammered dulcimers full time.  If you have never heard Sweet Song, they are just the greatest.  I just found out that Jim Upshaw just ordered a birdseye maple, grand model,  hammered dulcimer from David for  Billie Joy.  And on it goes.  Enjoy the interview.

I’m from the Dallas/Ft Worth area, we live in a little community south of Dallas called Lillian – a wide spot in the road or a curve in the road  We’ve been out there  since 1981 but we’ve lived in Arlington, just a short distance from there before that.  But we got interested in hammered and mountain dulcimer both in 1978.  It was my wife and I and Dana Hamilton – who is from that area also.  Dana and I were both vocational teachers in the same school district at that time.  My wife and I had traveled to Branson, Missouri and I heard a hammered dulcimer being played – really loved the sound of it, just fascinated by the sound of it.  So when we came home, we were planning on another trip – we were teachers at the time so we could take a few trips during the summer.  We were planning on another trip with Dana and his wife to Colorado and I asked Dana.  Dana played the guitar at that time.  I played the radio.  I asked Dana, “Have you ever heard of a hammer dulcimer?”  And Dana said, “Yea I have, I’ve got a record of a guy playing one of those.  My mother-in-law gave it to me to play my guitar along with.”  Well it was Bill Spence’s very first album – The Hammered Dulcimer.  I made an eight track tape of it.  We had a tape player in our vehicle and we listened to it all the way to the mountains and back.  And by that time we were hooked.  That’s how the two of us got interested in it. 

                Then we found a hammered dulcimer kit in Colorado, that we bought.  It was the deluxe model, I’ll never forget how terrible it was.  But it was just playable enough to let us know that we might be able to play.  Dana was always just a little bit ahead of me because he had some musical training.  But he was a challenge, I was always chasing him so it made me work hard.  We didn’t have that but just a few months when we realized that we needed something better.  We both had one, he had one and I had one. 

                We found some dulcimer information that was very little back during that time.  We heard of Andy’s Front Hall because of that Bill Spence album.  And Andy sent us a list of 7 or 8 builders.  Well we got a few brochures and pictures – which we couldn’t afford to buy one at that time.  Dana and I decided that we would just make one so we made our first one – which turned out reasonably successful.  That was still in 1978.  We played two or three songs, people had never heard on before so they would ask us to come play. 

                Later on in early 1979, we already had some other ideas so we build the second one of ours.  He built one and I built one.  They turned out to be real nice instruments – real playable.  They had a good sound to them and we played those for years. 

                We went to Mountain View in 1979.  My mom had heard about that festival they have up there.  That was the first time we had ever saw anybody besides us actually play one.  Now I had heard one in Branson but there were too many people around to try to see.  I waited until everybody left and said, “What is that?”

                One of the funny stories we had there at Mountain View was – we got off from work and drove Thursday night all the way there.  All four of us were in my cab over camper pickup.  This was before children.  The next morning, boy, Dana and I were excited.  We pulled into this campground and we jumped out and there was a guy there just a few camps from us, playing the hammered dulcimer.  We knew that we had arrived.  We jumped out of that camper and ran down there and I looked at this guy and he was an old “German-style” player who held his hammers between his index and middle fingers.  I was crushed…  I had worked so hard to learn my 4 or 5 tunes and now I learn that I was doing all wrong.  I had seen anyone play.  But that was Al Jacobs and Al is the only one I have ever seen playing like that.  Once we got to the Folk Center, we met Lila, Harvey, Jay and Kathy.  Boy – what a week…you just can’t imagine how much we absorbed.  We also met Ester Kreek who was a beginning player at that time.  They had a dulcimer contest and Dana, who has no since at all, entered the contest.  And he won 4^th place – out of four contestants.  But Ester Kreek showed Dana chords on the hammered dulcimer and that opened up – I mean a light came on to him.  My light was a lot dimmer.  I didn’t understand chords all that well. 

                We were just turned on by that.  Every time we had a chance, we were out playing.  Dana and I took a little music course to try to understand some of the music terminology.  One of our dreams as we drove back and forth to the class was to talk about – wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a dulcimer club and maybe even have some dulcimer concerts in our area. 

                In June of 1980 we went to Winfield and saw John McCutchenon , Guy Carowin, The Malcolm Baglers

                We had heard of the Dulcimer Players News by then and we sent information to them about starting this club.  And so in the summer of 1980, we had thirty something people at our first meeting.  That was the year it was 112 and 113 degrees all up and down here.  That was the beginning of the Lone Star State Dulcimer Society.  We elected officers and formed the club that day.  Shortly after that then, Dana and I and our families had traveled back east because there no dulcimer players around here that we were aware of.  We traveled by east and went to the Granbury Dulcimer Festival in Binghamton, New York.  That is where I first met Bill Spence. 

                One of the fascinations for me as a builder has always been the sound of Bill Spence’s Band – the sound and tone of his hammer dulcimer.  Bill was just a super guy to meet back then.  I was so fascinated by it.  So that Sunday, I finally got up enough courage to go up and ask him if I could play on his dulcimer a little bit.  It was sitting out under a shade tree where he had been playing.  He said, “Sure, go right ahead.”   So I started banging around on it – and he was talking to somebody.  He tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t go away.”  So I stayed and got an hour or better, impromptu, workshop from Bill Spence. I was totally impressed by his concern for a guy who couldn’t put two notes together.  I learned more at that particular point than, you know in that concentrated time, than I have ever learned. 

                Before I found the music in 1978, I never knew that I would be able to do what I do today.  Not being trained in music, I can’t tell you exactly what happened or how it happened.  I had to practice, I stayed with it.  At one point I hit a plateau, you know what I’m talking about.  But yet, I can remember one Sunday, Grandpa Jones was on TV, maybe it was Saturday afternoon.  Alicia was on there playing Over The Waterfall or something like that.  It was a new idea.  I was watching that then the phone rang and it was Dana.  He said, “Hey, did you hear what she was doing?”   So, he was always a challenge to me.  I can remember one time getting to a plateau – Dana don’t remember this, but I remember this real well.  I was over at his house and the girls were gone somewhere.  He and I was working on something and I just couldn’t get it.  And finally, Dana gritted his teeth and said, “You are gonna get this if it kills me.”   And I appreciated this because he was always a challenge and something to keep me going.  So it is always good to have somebody to play with you.  And then after awhile in ’82, we went back to Binghamton  again.  Dana won the National Championship in ’80.  He really progressed so fast.  In ’82 we went back, believe it or not, as part of the entertainment in Granbury and Bill Spence was there again.   And I just picked Bill’s brain on the tone and the sound of his instrument because I was just amazed.  I was on my 25^th instrument that I built.  I had started building that style.  A guy by the name of Michael Miller built his.  It was built to Bill’s specifications.  Bill had built some earlier ones.  But the one he was playing was built by Michael Miller in about 1975.  Michael Miller was from the upper New York area somewhere.  About 5 years ago, it was about when Steve Heiser bought his from me that Bill bought one from me.  His had disintegrated.  Bill gave it to me about two years ago.  I dissected it and made a replica of it.  I realize all that music and all that heritage in the instrument.  I need to get you some articles, Jerry, of the heritage of that music from up there.  Andy Spence, who is Bill’s wife, has wrote – they have a big festival up there – Old Songs Fest every year.  Year before last and last year and this year, she has written about the old time music from up there.  It is about how the music evolved and how it was preserved in the families and what Bill had to do with it with the hammered dulcimers.  And the difference it has made in their lives.  I’ll have to get you some copies of it. 

                So – that is how I started building that style of instrument.  I always enjoyed playing that style of music, old time dance music.  I can just feel it.  I could feel it – now I couldn’t do it but eventually I got to where do it.  I knew what I wanted.  Most of you guys are more versatile than I am.  I really focus on the old time music.  My brother-in-law, Russell, focused on the other spectrum of the… the arpeggio, chord runs and the pretty stuff and I always focused on the other.  Dana can do some of both, he is so much more talented than I am. 

                My wife played piano before we were married.  I can remember before we were married and before we got in this type of music, we went and bought her an old upright piano that we could afford and she couldn’t three notes on that piano without having a piece of music in front of her.  Then she took up the mountain dulcimer.  Actually, we almost kinda bought the hammer dulcimer for her but I was the one that wound up playing it.  It has been a real thrill.  And the things we’ve got to do and the places that we’ve gotten to go because of the music and everything.  And the people we’ve gotten to meet, it has just been a real thrill.  You know, the things we’ve gotten to do because we got involved – somehow – in this.  You know, one of the things that I tell everybody is that it is a struggle at first and it is hard to realize, “Can I do this?”   You can do it if you want to.  There are just as many people tone deaf as there are with perfect pitch.  You just have to train yourself.  At thirty years old, all I had done was sing a little in the choir and they probably asked me to not sing out loud.  It was a matter of developing that “ear” more than anything else.  Now I have got a good enough ear that I can pick out tunes, I hear things,  you just feel things the way the music sounds, the bounce and the feel of the dance tunes.  It was a struggle getting there but I wanted it real bad.  I can’t say enough about Dana’s involvement and Bill’s involvement in that.  I was more that please that a player of his caliber would take interest in me.  He had a 200 mile drive to go home that Sunday afternoon and to be at work that next morning because Bill is not a full time musician – he’s got a job and he show me all of this stuff and spent all of this time with me.  That impressed me a lot.  Maybe he was just fascinated with Texans, I’m not sure but he talked us in to going to a festival in Albany which was coming up the next weekend.  It was the last festival that the Bob Beers and all of the Beers Family it.  It was rich in tradition and a big part in preserving it. When we got there he just showed us all around, it was just wonderful. 

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 Interview with David Schnaufer

 We were in Covington, Louisiana at the Mardi Gras Dulcimer Festival.  I had just heard David Schnaufer and Steve Seifert in concert.  I had just experienced some of the best music that I had ever heard in my life.  People were all around David.  I had asked him for an interview earlier in the day.  He saw me.  He walked over to the side and we sat in a couple of chairs.  I had a little tape recorder.  The man was so easy to talk to – after all, he is a fellow East Texan.   The following is an interview with David Schnaufer:

 I have lived in Nashville, Tennessee for 14 years but I was born in Hearn, Texas.  I was born in a building that is now the Western Auto – in fact I don’t even know if it is still there – that little old town has fell on hard times.  I lived in Franklin a little bit then moved to LaMarque, Texas.  That’s where I really grew up.  My folks were from Tennessee Colony near Palestine, Texas. 

            I got a jews harp for my 5^th birthday.  My dad taught me how to play that and then sometime later, I started playing the harmonica.  But I never was any kind of musician or anything, I just kinda made noise you know and stuff.  And when I was 20, I started kinda thinking about playing music.  Emmy Lou Harris and Graham Parsons play in Houston one night.  And I knew – that is when I was 20 and that is when I knew that I wanted to play music.  So I went looking for something with strings.  I did a little autoharp, I tried that for – you know – a day.  And guitar, well, I knew that wasn’t may thing.  I was going to school at Sul Ross out in Alpine, Texas.  I was visiting a friend in Austin one weekend and I went past a music store and the whole front was full of instruments that I had never seen before – they were dulcimers.  They were $40.  So I bought one of those.  It was my 21^st birthday so that was in September of ’73.  I started playing and I went back out to West Texas and I couldn’t get away from the dulcimer.  I’d play in the morning and I would try walking back up that mountain to go to school and I’d get half way up and I would turn around and run back down.  I didn’t know what to do with it – I didn’t know how to tune it or anything.  My brother was a priest in Georgetown.  So I would hitchhike from Alpine, Texas all the way across the state for my brother to tune my dulcimer and then I’d just, “See ya, I gotta get back.”  He played the guitar – my brother was the musician in the family.  He was always a good clarinet player.  So, he tuned it up for me – I made a couple of them long hauls and so I quite school about two weeks after I started playing music.  And I went and saw my brother and that is when I started working in construction and to be around my brother so he could tune my dulcimer for me until I learned how to do it.  And I just been playing ever since. 

            Nobody heard me play for about the first year or year and a half that I played.  In 1976, I saw a ad for Winfield, they were having a dulcimer – the first national dulcimer contest.  But it wasn’t  the Winfield in the Fall, it was one that they had in the Spring.  They had it just one year.  So I went there to listen.  I was playing out in the parking lot just by myself and talking with some dulcimer people.  A fellow named Roger Harris from Oklahoma City, he entered me in the dulcimer contest.  I’d never played in front of anybody and so I entered in dulcimer contest and I won.  I only knew three tunes but I played those three tunes for a year and a half.  I had Golden Slippers down, Santa Anna’s Retreat, I had that down. 

            I won that then went back working construction in Keller, Texas – just north of Ft Worth.  Then during the rainy season, I would take off hitchhiking looking for dulcimer players.  I’d find out the name of a dulcimer player, I’d call them up and go see them.  Or, I’d just show up, I’m much of a phone person.  I’d just show up and say, “You wanna play some dulcimer?”   So I went all over the country meeting… I went up to the Northwest – I met Bob Force and Albert DeShea and went all over the mountain areas in the Carolina and West Virginia.  I chased it down, I think I knew every dulcimer player there was.  Then at that same time, it was the first Cosby Dulcimer Festival happened.  You know, that was the first convention where dulcimer players had ever got to meet each other.  Most of the people were in their early 20’s so there was a lot of energy going on.  That was in either ’75 or ’76 – that first Cosby – I met a lot of people and got to hear a lot of dulcimer styles from all over.   I met Bonnie Carol there and I moved out to Colorado and built dulcimers with her.  We had a shop out there for three years and traveled around and played.  I learned a lot of stuff from her.  And a classical mandolinist that was a friend of mine who was  teaching me stuff.  We ended up playing as a trio, me and Bonnie and her.  We traveled the West Coast and East Coast and after that, I moved to Washington D.C. and was going to teach out there but that wasn’t going very well and so I ended up in West Virginia with Alan Freeman who I had met at a craft fair up in Pennsylvania a couple years before.  My car died out on his farm and so – and he knew all the old banjo players and fiddle players, all the old time traditional players.  So I got to pick with them all the time I lived out there – about four years are so.  And then, I moved back to Texas a few times during that time period.  I can’t stay away – I’m always going back to Texas. 

            I did a little EP and decided that I was going to move to Nashville.  An EP is the size of a 45 rpm record but it has four songs on it instead of two and it runs at 33 1/3^rd.  I thought it would be perfect for folk music cause you could put four songs on it.  So I did that and moved to Nashville.  I had been writing Chet Adkins’ office for years cause I loved Chet’s playing.  I called him up one day and I talked to his secretary and she said, “If you really want to do this, you ought to move to Nashville.”  I had already been there once, I went to the Opry and saw Earnest Tubb and Kitty Wells. 

            So I moved to Nashville and started playing in restaurants for tips.  I had always written songs so Nashville is song town so then I started playing with the Judd’s.  They were the first people – they had just made the scene.  I played the dulcimer, the second album, I played for their next four albums.  Then through that, I hooked up with Polly Dunn and Kathy Mattea and Dan Steels and lots of different country artist like Michael Murphy.  A lot of these people had heard me play in clubs or – I played every gig I could possible play.

            And then, let’s see, then I got a publishing deal so I didn’t have to work so hard for rent.  That meant that I was getting paid to write songs.  So that was pretty neat.  Let’s see, it’s been twelve since I’ve had – I’ve been totally making my living making music.  Then I was in a rock band this whole time, a country rock band.  We did acoustic kind of rock.  We got a big major label record and stuff.  And that all went totally crazy and I ended up living back in my car on the streets. 

            Then the university hired me.  I played at a dinner party and the dean heard me play and he said, “I want you at our classical music school.”  So I’ve been over there for three years now.  And that kinda brings us up to date. 

            Steve’s grandmother had given him a dulcimer when he was 15 or 16 and he was studying classical piano.  He was really a hard working, training musician in his early teens.  His parents brought him to see me in Cincinnati.  He was from Kentucky – right near Cincinnati.  I was playing at an old time pickin parlor.  He had been going to college about thirty miles from Nashville studying recording science.  He was playing dulcimer, he gave up piano when he was 16.  That is what he put his energy into.  My friend Sandy Conatser knew somebody that knew somebody that knew him and he was just looking for somebody to play dulcimer with.  So they hooked up together and had been playing ever now and then, ever week or so.  Then he found out that I was living there in Nashville so we started hanging out together.  That was three years ago. 

            If you want to play the dulcimer, all you got to do is start playing.  I was always told that I couldn’t play, I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t this and I couldn’t do that.  And the dulcimer doesn’t - it doesn’t care about that.  If you want to do it – you will do it.  It is easier on the dulcimer – I still believe than any other instrument.  I had no previous knowledge of music except that it sorta worked like a harmonica – that was about it. 

            Thank you, we’ll do this again sometimes and talk that East Texas stuff.         

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INTERVIEW WITH NEAL WALTERS

 NEAL:  My dad played the tuba in the High School Band, that was in Minnesota but I was raised in California.  They moved from Minnesota to Colorado to Arizona somewhere and ended up in California.   While he was gone working on the road, she moved to all the places in a short period of time and we ended up in California.  I was about six months old.  And when he came back, he joined us in California.  He had played in the High School band. 

   So when I was in about the 4^th grade, they decided that I needed to play an instrument so I got to play the baritone horn and trombone.  In high school I was playing in dance bands.  But then when I joined the Air Force, the horns weren’t a kind of thing that they would let you take along in your duffel bag and the guys in the barracks the didn’t appreciate a guy practicing a baritone horn.  So I bought a guitar from a guy.  I was about 21 years old at the time.  I bought the guitar for about 35 bucks.  The Kingston Trio was real big.  I grew up with Elvis and all of the rock and roll kind of things that was going on in the ‘50s.  I appreciated all of that but I never really had any desire to play that kind of music.  It wasn’t until I heard the Kingston Trio and some of the folk music that I thought that it was a little more accessible.   So I wanted to learn it so I bought the guitar and played it for two or three years.  Then I bought an Autoharp in about 1965, it was an Oscar Schmidt right out of Sears.  Coleen had some high school classmates who were professional singers who played autoharp and guitar.  They were appearing at places like Newport and things like that.  They were real good, they were Kathy and Carol.  So, the Kingston Trio was only the start so when I started really understanding where the material originally came from and started working my way back, I sort of retrogressed back and I had a Bluegrass phase and I even went back into Old Time and started getting interested in traditional music.  I was in the Air Force and there were records in the Exchange which were really inexpensive.  I mean I wasn’t making much money but we were in Japan and I was buying LPs for like $2.30 a piece or something like that.  I was really building up a good collection and I had some really good friends in the Air Force that played that kind of music and I learned a lot from them and learned a lot of how to play.  Then we got stationed in Alabama and going to school at Maxwell, it was the school for Squadron Officers.  We went to a Bluegrass festival and a guy was selling dulcimers from the back of a truck and I bought one for $50 or something like that.  And I could play it right away.  It was easier than the guitar and I was already playing the guitar.  Right after that we moved to Washington, that was around 1977.  I was stationed at the Pentagon.  And when we moved into town I was playing the guitar, the Autoharp and I had been playing the banjo a little bit and I had bought this dulcimer.  And we went out to Wolf Trap to a concert and we heard about another concert that the Washington Folklore Society was putting on so we went to that.  We got one of their newsletters and in that newsletter it said that there was a dulcimer class about to start.  So even though I had bought this dulcimer and doing OK with it, I decided that it would be a good way to meet people so I enrolled in the class and my teacher was Maddie MacNeil.  It wasn’t long after that I got hooked up with Keith Young and those people and that is when I joined the Mill Run Dulcimer Band.  The guitar player was ill, she had hurt her back and was in traction.  She wasn’t able to play so they took me on to take her place and when she came back I just stayed and we became a 5 piece band instead of a 4 piece band.  But I added a banjo because they didn’t have a banjo.  So then I picked up the mandolin and tried to learn the fiddle. 

   In 1981 we were transferred back to Germany.  I had been in the Mill Run Band and it was kind of a hard thing leave    but we made arrangements to get stationed back in Washington when that tour was up.  So we were gone for two years but we came back.  And that is when I decided to get out of the Air Force and just stay there rather than move again.  Then I started going up to places like Augusta and hanging around Galax and getting really immersed in this kind of stuff.  I started learning to play the fiddle which was really a turning point because it really brought me back into traditional music in a big way.  I took classes from Bruce Greene and Pete Southerland and all those fiddle players.  I continued to be interested in recordings and so forth and really started to study it. 

   We met John and Heidi, the other part of Doofus, up in Augusta one year.  We hit it off really well and we sang on the porch and ran into them at a couple of other festivals and we sort of drifted together and pretty soon we decided we were going to be a band.  We have done some performing and we cut a CD but it is hard, they live in Connecticut, we live in Washington so we don’t get together a lot.  And I am still in Mill Run so I’ve been juggling both of them. 

 JERRY:  You seem to have a lot of music theory.

 NEAL:   That is just something that I picked up along the way.  I have been teaching dulcimer in the Washington Area for going on 15 or 20 years now.  And as I got in to it, Margaret is probably the same even though she has had a more formal education.  It is just the process of preparing tablature and trying to teach other people what you are trying to do.  You learn a lot more doing it that way than if you were on the other end, the receiving end.  And I got really interested in, the dulcimer is a really interesting instrument, you can learn a lot about music from playing the dulcimer.  You go back into the old Greek modes and you start looking at the theory behind it and it all hangs together pretty easy.  And it is easier to explain on the dulcimer than it is on another instruments where you have minor, augmented fifths, thirteenth chords and things like that on the guitar, you don’t have that on the dulcimer.  You have simple chords but the theory is just enough to use practically.  I got into it that way. 

 JERRY:  The book, Music Hound, how did it come about?

 NEAL:   Well I had a good friend by the name of Kathy Whelon, she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  She plays the Autoharp and I had met her at several festivals, we sang together and played tunes together.  It is one of the people you always meet when you go to a festival.  There is a million people like that, I am sure you know.  I first met her way back in the 80’s.  But she had a close friend who worked for this publishing company.  And the publishing company had done a series of these books – on country music, on blues, on jazz, on rock.  They wanted to a folk volume but they didn’t have an editor and so they were just casting about to see what they could find and this other person asked Kathy if she could recommend anybody and Kathy gave them my name.  So they called me up and asked me to submit a writing sample and was I interested – and I was.  So I submitted the sample and so they hired me to do it. 

 JERRY:  You have how many CDs?

 NEAL:  I literally have 5,000 CDs and LPs, since I have retired I haven’t bought near as many as I did before I retired.  I had a real nice collection, I had been interested in it in a real studious kind of way.  It wasn’t just a hobby, it was a passion so I really worked hard at it.  And it worked out well on the book because I used basically what I knew as the starting point and then we hired about 70 writers.  Of course most of them were experts, some of them were professional critics.  But I ended up writing a number of them myself because there were people that I wanted to include in the book that nobody wanted to write about except me.  So I wrote about a hundred of the entries. 

 JERRY:  So music means more to you than just turning the radio on and walking around the house.

NEAL:  Yes it would be fair to say that.  Music is a really big part of my life.  It is something that I am good at I guess and it is something that I am interested in and I made more good friends from music than I ever made through any other endeavor.  People that play this kind of music, as you well know, are some of the finest people around. 

 JERRY:  So what have you learned from it all?

 NEAL:  Well I think that you can express some really deep philosophical things in simple terms through music and you know it’s just so soothing and it gives you such a sense of peace when you hear something played well. 

 JERRY:  Even the old songs?

 NEAL:  The old songs particularly, in my opinion.  There’s something that rings across the years when you listen to those songs and you learn that those people weren’t a lot different than you.  They are just the kind of songs that appeal to me.  I like new songs too if they have the same sentiment as the old songs but I am not really interested in contemporary music in general. 

 JERRY:  So what are you doing now?

 NEAL:   Well, a little bit of everything but we are doing a little bit of writing like that book, doing a lot of teaching on the dulcimer at camps and things like that.  And I still teach in Washington a couple times a year, they are seven week classes.  Keith Young runs it.  I teach the dulcimer repertoire part of it so that keeps us busy at least a third of the year.  Then we have been going to festivals and traveling and since I retired from doing full time day time work, in the last couple of winters we have been going down south.  Travelling around meeting people, a lot of the people.  We met you guys for the first time at Boone.  We are just visiting with people who are willing to take us in and give us their hospitality. 

 JERRY:  You have written books on music theory, Margaret is using one to teach theory to the North Harris County Dulcimer Society.   In regard to the cover, who is that?

 NEAL:  Actually I kinda admired that picture, it was on menu in a restaurant that we ate at in London England.  We were stationed in England before we came back to the States in the 70’s and one of our children went over there to work for a bank and so naturally, Coleen and I had to go over there and visit with them every now and again.  So we went to this restaurant in London, it was a Belgian restaurant and their specialty was snail.  And this guy’s picture was on the menu – I am always on the lookout for stuff like that so I actually bought one of the menus from the place and we brought it back home. 

 JERRY:  You have a very large database which I saw this afternoon.

 NEAL:  Yes, in terms of data records, it is nearly 90 thousand records.  I began doing that right after we got back from Germany, it was about 1983 or 1984.  Computers were a new thing back then, or at least desk top home computers were a new thing.  I had an old CPM machine and I decided that I had too much and I needed to catalog it.  So everything that I learned about computers sort of stemmed from that decision to do it for myself.  But I parlayed that home stuff into a job with Oracle and lots of other things so it has been really good for me but I have been working on it steady ever since 1983.  It is kind of personal to me but it is really an easy thing to use and I can really do a lot of research in my collection using the database.  There are some really great collectors out there.  There is a fellow in Illinois, I am trying to remember his name, Dave and Cathy know him really well too.  Don Stevens is his name.  He has a huge collection of LPs, videos, he has twenty seven tapes of Cathy Barton playing banjo when she was young.  He has all that stuff that he has taped over the years and he shared some of it with me. 

 JERRY:  A lot of the people that we know are adults who don’t know a lot about music or much about theory.   It appeals to them but they don’t know if they can do this or not.  Do you have anything to say about that?

 NEAL:  I have a lot to say about that as a matter of fact.  First of all, anybody that plays music shouldn’t worry about it one way or the other.  But they also shouldn’t use it as a crutch for not learning more.  In other words, the story, “I just play for my own enjoyment and I am not interested.”  I think that is a cop-out basically.  I think that people really would be interested in learning more but they are just a little afraid to jump in there and try it.  And I have kind of developed my own idea.  I mean music is equal parts physical skills, which people develop by practicing, it’s emotional – you get emotionally involved with it and your music is better if you are emotionally involved with it but is a part of your music that you have to practice at too.  You can’t just be just be emotional about it and it’s going to come out good.  You’ve got to somehow channel that emotion a little bit.  And then there is an intellectual aspect to it too.  And if you know a little bit about music theory and chords and those kinds of things, then this common complaint that, “I don’t hear things,” kinda goes away because it is my theory that there is only one guy in a thousand that really hears it – the rest of us practice until the point where it starts to make a little more sense and then we start to anticipate what it should be even if we don’t hear it.  You learn to do that just like you learn to do anything else.  And if you invest the time right from the very time you start playing, in all thee areas, then when you are ready to progress, you will have the skills you need.  And you need that knowledge to go further; otherwise you kinda get in a rut. 

  People Neal speaks of:

Maddie MacNeil is the publisher/editor of Dulcimer Players News. 

Bruce Greene is a great Old Time fiddler in North Carolina.  Five Miles of Ellum wood is a great CD to own if you would like to sample his type of music on the fiddle.  He is also on some of Don Pedi’s tapes. 

Cathy Barton and Dave Para are great.  They collect and perform old songs. 

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    Wayne Henderson

                Wayne Henderson believes that we are living in the golden age of  guitar building and playing.  Wayne is a great builder as well as player.  Wayne lives in Rugby, Virginia.  You probably won’t find it on a map, it is in the mountains of southwest Virginia.  He lives on a dirt road in a comfortable old farmhouse that was built in 1940.  He is a descendant from several generations of farmers.  He sleeps in a bed his grandfather made.  His father was a better-than-average fiddler, and was in a band, the Rugby Gully Jumpers, who took third place in the band competition at the Fiddler’s convention in Galax, Virginia in 1935.  Friends and relatives would come to visit and play, music was played regularly in the Henderson household, and Wayne began wanting to play the guitar at the age of four or five. 

                E.C. Ball, who kept a small general store in Rugby, played guitar and sang with his wife Orna on a local radio station.  Ball convinced Wayne that it made more sense to use a thumbpick and two finger picks that one flat pick.  Ball said, “Boy, if you are going to learn to play guitar, you want to get you some finger picks.”  Wayne has polished this style to a high degree. While Ball’s playing was in the style of Merle Travis, Wayne adapted Ball’s technique to develop his own unique style, which sounds like flat-picking.

                When Wayne was just twelve years old, he attempted to build his first guitar.  He used materials found around the house.  He had a lot of problems with it but learned a lot. 

                About the time he graduated from high school, Wayne began a half-hour radio program every Saturday morning over WKSK in Jefferson, North Carolina.  The band  consisted of Wayne, his brother Max, Boyd Stewart, and Albert Hash.  After working all night to tape the first two shows, they decided it was better to do the shows live, since mistakes made live were gone as quickly as they were made.  The show lasted for eight years. 

                Selling a guitar that he made, was a life changing moment for Wayne.  He had grown up in the country in a cash poor economy and at that point had never even seen a hundred-dollar bill, let alone five hundred dollars, which the guitar sold for.  Wayne knew right then what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.  Establishing yourself as a guitarmaker takes a while, and as Wayne reached adulthood, like most people starting out in the music business, he realized that he needed a “day job,” and he became a rural mail carrier.  Wayne drives the roads every day delivering the mail to his neighbors and pursues his guitar building and playing in his spare time. 

                From 1968 until 1973, Wayne would travel to Nashville to work part-time for George Gruhn in the guitar repair department of his store.  He stayed for short periods of time, returning to Rugby to keep his own guitar building going, and sometimes bringing work from Gruhn’s to do in his own shop.  Wayne appreciates the opportunity working at Gruhn’s gave him to work on some of the finest instruments and to meet many of the nation’s top musicians. 

                One evening George Gruhn took Wayne backstage at the Grand Old Opry, still in the Ryman Auditorium at that time.  Wayne struck up an acquaintance with Sam McGee, one of his guitar playing idols.  After Wayne had been playing with Sam in his dressing room for a couple of hours, Sam asked him if he would like to back him up on stage.  Wayne was still dressed in the blue jeans he worked in and felt uncomfortable with this and the fact that he wasn't in the union, so he declined.  He wishes now that he had gone ahead and done it.  He would always be able to say that he had played on the Grand Old Opry.

                Wayne has never forgotten how hard it was to get a good guitar when he was young, and he particularly enjoys building guitars for people who appreciate a good instrument and are serious about their music, but have a limited budget.  Some well known musicians do own and play a Henderson, among them, Peter Rowan, Alice Gerrard, John Cephas, Mick Maloney and Doc Watson.  Watson lives not too far away and sometimes stops in to pick.  Doc owns a Henderson mandolin, and Norman Blake has ordered one.  Tony Rice has come to Wayne for repair work, as do pickers from near and far – they all seem to find their way to Wayne’s shop.

                Wayne’s music has been taking him places he never expected to see.  He performs regularly in his home area; he has twice toured the east and west coasts with the Masters of the Steel String” guitar tour sponsored by the National Council for the Traditional Arts.  In 1995, he received the National Heritage Fellowship presented by the National Endowment for the Arts.  He has been to Asia and Africa and has played festivals around the United States and at Carnegie Hall in New York City as part of Nick Spitzer’s Folk Masters series.  Recently Wayne was visited by a group from France who spent some time videotaping and interviewing him. 

                In 1995 Wayne organized a one-day festival held in the Grayson Highlands State Park in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia, featuring a guitar picking competition.  It has become an annual tradition.  He teaches classes in guitar building and playing at the Augusta Heritage Workshops and at Blue Ridge Old-Time Music Week in Mars Hill, North Carolina. 

                After attending a concert by Wayne, I found myself standing next to him at a late night jam session in Fox Hall.  I told him how much I enjoyed his playing.  This opened up conversation between us and I got to know a quiet, kind man who plays a mean guitar.  We have an invitation to visit Wayne after the week at Boone. 

Several days later, while we were visiting again, I learned that Wayne knows R.G. Abser of Wilsboro, N.C.  R.G.’s wife, Rhetta, was Margaret’s roommate in college.   

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Jim Taylor

This interview with Jim Taylor was taken in the Fox Dorm of Mars Hill College in June 2000.  Jim is a hammer dulcimer player and builder.  He specialized in Civil War tunes and Celtic music.  He is married to Shelia Kay Adams. 

 I am originally from Henderson County North Carolina, just south of Asheville.  I play the hammer dulcimer, guitar, a little bit of banjo and I sing too.  I picked up the guitar when I was about 8 or 10, playing whatever they had in   the MelBay Guitar books.  My grandmother on my mother’s side – she plays the piano – she’s 103.  She played Ragtime piano with my grand daddy who had a Ragtime Band back in the early teens.  He was a Shape Note singer too, he and his brothers had them a Shape Note Singing Society out there in Ettawa, North Carolina.  He was a song master so he sang the old shape notes like Christian Harmony and some Sacred Harp.  I guess that gene sort of skipped my mom since she is not musical at all but it came to me and my sister.  On my dad’s side of the family, his mother was a music major at Columbia College South Carolina and his grand daddy was a real fine baritone.  And my dad is a real good singer too. 

I went to school at Mars Hill, this very college, majored in religion and philosophy.  After I got my degree here, I went out to Fort Worth to the seminary out there – Southwestern Baptist Seminary.  I got my degree out there and that is where I met Russell Cook and Dana Hamilton all those fellows out there. 

The first time that I had ever heard a hammer dulcimer was on a recording that Jerry Reed Smith had made called Stray Away Child.  I just fell in love with it just off of the tape.  So I was out in Fort Worth and a friend of mine had run across Russell at the Tandy Center downtown – he had a shop downtown.  So she took me down to see Russell and I just went nuts.  I thought that I had died and gone to heaven.  So Russell and I struck up a friendship.  I kept going over there everyday – I skipped class to go over there.  I spent a lot of time with Russell.  So he showed me a couple of little licks here and there and I bought this kit.  I can’t remember where I bought it at – it wasn’t from Russell.  Maybe it was from Hughes.  So anyway, I put it together – I took it home on Christmas break and did most of the gluing and stuff and brought it back to Seminary and sort of finished it up.  We had an apartment out there.  I started playing on this dulcimer and it just sounded awful.  I couldn’t keep it in tune.  I sounded terrible but I learned how to play on it.  In fact I have a tape at the house that my old roommate sent me of me playing this dulcimer.  I played it out there and Russell showed me some things.  I also got some stuff from Dana.  We use to go up to Mountain View, Arkansas – up to the Ozark Folk Center.  The whole crowd from Arlington, Fort Worth and that area – we would all go up there and just have a great time – I loved that.  It was David Lindsey and Linda Thompson and all that bunch.  I use to go to the club meeting there in Irving. 

So when I left school there I went back home.  I was going into student ministry is what I was going to do.  I spent about three months in Arkansas but I felt like what I wanted to do was make hammer dulcimers. 

I really wasn’t a wood worker – I came back home and used all the money that I had to buy my saws and stuff and just learned as I went.  I set up shop in my parent’s garage – which drove them crazy.  So I started building dulcimers and selling them – that was in 1983 or 84.  And then I bought this place up here in Mars Hill.  I did it full time for about ten years and then started going into music more.  I still build a few custom orders for dulcimers. 

I now mainly market CDs.  The Civil War stuff – I market through the Battlefield Parks, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg and places like that.  I sell a lot of CDs.  I do craft demonstrations too at the Craft Guild that I belong to.  We set up in front of the Folk Art Center on the Parkway just out of Asheville.  It is Southern Highland Guild.  I do that about once a month for several days at a time.                                                                        

JERRY: How did you get interested in the Civil War?

JIM:  My dad’s family was from South Carolina.

JERRY: Where bout’s?

JIM:  Around Charleston.

JERRY:  Where bout’s in Charleston?

JIM:  My grandmother lived on James Island.

JERRY:  Where bout’s on James Island?

JIM:  Well now there’s a place called – now you’ve asked me and I can’t think of it.

JERRY:  That’s alright.

JIM:  The name has escaped me.

JERRY:  Riverland Terrace?

JIM:  Yea!

JERRY:  What street in Riverland Terrace?

JIM:  I should know the name of that street, I’ll have to call Dad and ask him.  The house is made of rock, it is on the corner of …

JERRY:  Maybank Highway?

JIM:  Maybank Highway!  That’s it!  Actually it is just right off of Maybank.

JERRY:  You didn’t live there?

JIM:  No, just visited my grandmother.

MARGARET:  Now what is her name?

JIM:  Taylor – Mae Taylor.  She did all of the flower arraignments for the Methodist Church and Baptist Church there on James Island. 

JERRY:  Margaret attended James Island Baptist Church – and so did I.  That is where Margaret and I met – at James Island Baptist Church.

JIM:  That’s the Civil War connection I guess.  When I would go to Charleston, they would always try to figure out something to do with me.  So we would go to Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie and that all soaked in and I have just had a fascination with it ever since.  I am a re-enactor.  I got my degree from Western Carolina on American History and I did my thesis on a Civil War Regiment that was raised in this area.  So the music all blended in.  I teach an Elderhostel class over in Highlands on the Civil War in Western North Carolina.  I give talks occasionally to different groups – Sons of the Confederate Veterans and Civil War round tables.  I do music programs for them too.  It is fun to sit there and get paid to talk about something that you love. 

JERRY:  Now your wife is a very interesting person.

JIM:  Yes she is.

JERRY:  How did ya’ll meet?

JIM:  There is a festival here every October – Lunsford Festival – and when I was going to school here, I use to go and Shelia would be one of the people at the festival.  I didn’t that much attention to her then but when I moved up here finally, I noticed her again at the Lunsford Festival – she was always with those old ballad singers.  So I would sit there with my little tape recorder and tape all of those old singers.  I then decided that I wanted somebody to teach me banjo lessons.  She agreed to do that.  I would pay her – and you know - she never has given it back.  Anyway that is how we got to know each other.  It was a pretty gradual courtship. 

JERRY:  Now Shelia is a performer.

JIM:  Yes she is.  She is something else – very interesting.  She will fill up a stage.  I can’t do that.  I go out on the stage and the stage is huge.  Shelia goes out there and the stage just shrinks and there she is. 

JERRY:  So what about the future?

JIM:  I have another Civil War CD coming out next month.  Bruce Green, Don Pedi, Shelia and Carl Jones will be on it.  It is the Civil War Collection – Volume II. 

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 Wayne Henderson's 2000 Trip to Holland

Interview with Wayne Henderson.  In this interview, he tells of his tour to Holland in May/June 2000.  Wayne is a rural mail carrier who lives in Rugby, Virginia.  He is world renowned for both his guitar finger picking wizardry and his hand-crafted guitars and mandolins.  This interview took place in the Fox Dorm of Mars Hill College at a late night jam session.

We went to Holland just last week, the end of May and the first three days of June.  It was just me and Helen.  It came about – I was on a tour with my piano playing friend in France last summer and we played in this little restaurant one night and this fellow came up, he was from Holland – Marcelle – and seemed to be a super nice fellow and he came to our show and Helen came over with us.  She was at the show that night and we got to jammin’ some.  We invited Marcelle.  We had heard that he was a banjo player.  Helen had her fiddle there and we got to jammin’ and pickin’ and we sort of had us an old time jam there.  So we made an acquaintance with Marcelle.  I remember him saying something then, “Ya’ll ought to do a tour of Holland sometimes.” 

          Helen has got an email and along about Christmas time, this Marcelle fellow got in touch with Helen and they started emailing each other back and forth and asked if we would like to come to Holland.  She talked to me about it and I said, “Sure, that’s a place that I’ve never seen.”  So they started do their business back and forth and got it set up.  Marcelle got us set up with a friend of his who promotes a lot of shows and performances and things.  And he is big in the European world of Bluegrass, which is a big deal over there.

          He almost ended up getting us too many gigs – we played every night.  We player everything from loud, smoky bars, which is not that much fun you know, to a few really nice concerts.  The nicest concert was in a real fancy restaurant in the northern most part of Holland.  You could walk outside and go up on top of one of those dikes and you could see the ocean.  It looked to me like out in the middle of nowhere.  And when it come time to play, the place was full.  It held up to about 150 people.  They said they had sold out but I was really wondering about it because it was more remote than where I live.  They had a couple of other bands there.  From the Czech Republic, they had one of the best Bluegrass band that you have ever heard.  The Czech Republic is right now the hotbed for Bluegrass.  I would never have thought that.  You would have to see it for your own self to believe it.  I mean we live right where the best of that kind of stuff comes from and I’ve never heard anything any better than what that bunch of kids were.  Probably the oldest one was 23 or something.  Their band was so tight – they were doing some of the major players as good as they could do them themselves.  The name of the band was Fifty Fingers.  I wish there was some ways to get them over here so people could see them.  They are totally amazing.  It was a real enjoyable trip.  One thing that I was amazed at is how long they ate.  It was a fancy restaurant and they came in and started eating course after course after course and some of them ate there the whole night. 

          Everywhere we went was by train.  I had never done that before.  They were very efficient and always right on time.  And I didn’t know how popular I was over there.  Everywhere we went was signs with WC on it and signs pointing to WC.  You know I have a CD with the title W.C. Henderson and Company.  I’ll tell you, I just about quit mentioning my CD over there. 

          The worst thing, the currency exchange is terrible right now.  That caused us to come out a little bad because of our money.  When we booked it was 2 guilders to the dollar and when we got there it was 2.9 guilders to the dollar. 

          Another thing that we did was that we played for a refuge camp.  They were families from all over the world.  It was in a big building, it makes you sorta sad, but they were the lucky ones that they could get out.  They were there from Pakistan and Iraq and Somalia and all those countries that are in turmoil in war.  We went over wonderful there.  I don’t think that they have a lot of entertainment and they lived in rooms that were 5 square meters per person and a meter is something about like this right here.  Some of the kids were beautiful; it would just break your heart.  Helen took a bunch of pictures. 

          There is a company over there that came around and taped our shows.  At the end they said that they might want to produce a CD. 

 HELEN WHITE: When we arrived in Germany, we were so tired – it was the end of the trip.  We didn’t have anyone to help us and we had to carry our own stuff.  He was crabby when we arrived and they he learned that he had to pay to go to the bathroom. 

WAYNE:  And I didn’t have any money.

HELEN WHITE: When we got to Germany, God sent an Angel. 

WAYNE: We had heard that the guy that was supposed to come met us may not be able to. 

HELEN WHITE:  We weren’t sure when we arrived what would happen.  But then this beautiful, young, 27 year old, fitness queen, blonde …

WAYNE:  Yea, one of the most gorgeous women that I have ever seen in my life.

HELEN WHITE:  We arrived at the station and she comes over and says, “Are you Wayne?”

WAYNE:  I said, “Yea, absolutely!”

HELEN WHITE:  I just looked at him and said, “I can tell you are feeling better now.”

WAYNE:  Yea, I got a burst of energy there.

HELEN WHITE:  That was really a wonderful show that night.  They really took care of us.  They wanted to give us food and drink and give us a tour of the little town.  It was a really good audience.

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LEE ROWE   interviewed by Jerry Wright

I originally come from Portsmouth, Virginia, which is down on the coast.  I moved from there to Richmond, Virginia to go to college.  I fell in love with the dulcimer somewhere in between there. 

 At 10 years old my parents signed me up for piano class.  My brother plays piano and whet from there to play the guitar.  My sister took piano and went from there to play pretty much what ever she wants.  So when I came along, they signed me up for piano lessons with a teacher.  I hated the piano lessons, couldn’t stand them.  I lasted one year.  I quit and my brother stopped speaking to me cause I dropped out of the piano classes.  I instantly became the black sheep of the family.  I wanted to play an instrument but piano just wasn’t the one. 

 We took a trip to the Smoky Mountains and going through all of the tourist traps, we kept seeing dulcimers.  So I asked somebody if they were hard to play and a lady pulled one down and took out a dowel rod and started playing a song.  And I thought that I could that.  So that brought me back to music actually.  I was 16.  I got the dulcimer and a book.  I didn’t know any dulcimer people at the time and didn’t meet any until years later. 

 After I went to college I stopped playing the dulcimer.  I was living with a bunch of music majors.  I don’t know music, I play a folk instrument.  I would start playing something and they would say, “You don’t even know what you are doing do you?”  After a while of hearing this from these musicians I stopped playing.  I didn’t play much for a lot of years.  I was really discouraging to live with that many musicians.  I was majoring in art.  They were all music majors and mostly keyboard majors.  They were very much in to what they did.  Jazz music and all of that.  I couldn’t tell you melody from harmony or anything.  I could barely read music.  So I didn’t get a lot of respect.  Years later I ran into a guitar player with infinite patience and she was desperate to fill out a bill for a show that she was putting together.  So she heard me play the dulcimer.  She had a dulcimer because she played with another dulcimer player.  They had switched instruments and so she was trying to figure out the dulcimer.  I was at the house with a mutual friend and she brought this thing over and I asked her if I could play it.  So I played a couple of songs and she said, “You are pretty good, do you want to go on stage?”  After that we did about six weeks of rehearsing and put together about four songs.  This was in Richmond.  We went on stage and had a blast.  We formed a band and played around Richmond for a number of years.  She really taught me how to play.  Being a guitar player she taught me a lot about rhythm and really using an instrument.  She really inspired me to play it well.

 The band lasted up until we moved to Nashville which was 1995.  At that point I had met one or two dulcimer people.  Nobody of any name.  I came across David Schnaufer’s CDs.  I had to hunt them down.  Actually I had to have them special ordered.  The reason I found out about them, I was watching TNN and they played Fisher’s Hornpipe video.  So I found out his name and I went to the record store and pestered them until they ordered this CD for me.  The person had no idea who I was talking about.  She called her supplier and the look on her face was priceless.  She gets this look on her face and she is going, “Really – really – REALLY!”  And she hangs up and says, “Do you know he is on tour with the Everely Brothers?”  And I said, “Yes, I want his CD.”  So got the CD and I took it home and it was incredible.  It his first CD, Dulcimer Player Deluxe.  It was such an inspiration.  It completely changed the way I play dulcimer – it changed the way I think about the dulcimer. 

 After that the band did a recording.  We played around Richmond.  We recorded an entire album in one 5 hour session.  We went back the next day and mixed the entire album.  We went on TV. We just generally had a lot of fun.

 I went to my first dulcimer festival in 1993 in Boone, North Carolina.  I was scared to death.  I had been listening to David’s CD and some very old records from the late 70’s and early 80’s, Pacific Rim Dulcimer Project and stuff like that and I thought that everybody in the dulcimer world played that way.  I signed up for an intermediate level class and I ended up jamming with instructors while I was there.  I then learned that I was learning a lot more in the jam sessions than in the classes.  I met Tull Glazner that year, Maureen Sellers, Rob Brerton was there and Lois.  Those are the people that really stood out that year, they were the ones that made the biggest impression.  I had so much fun, I have been going back every year. 

So I did that for several years then got an invitation to teach at a festival.  That was the Ohio Valley Gathering in 1995.  It was a large class, I had a microphone and flip charts.  It was an advanced class.  I taught them Grandfather’s Clock.  We went through the whole thing, piece by piece.  A few years later, a person in my class came up to me.  She sat down with her playing partner and they played Grandfather’s Clock.  They had this incredible arrangement of it.  They had taken what I had taught them and built this great arrangement from it.  It was the most incredible experience that I had ever had.   

WHAT KEPT YOU MOTIVATED

 For about ten years I didn’t do much, I played one song.  Once I had heard David’s CD, I realized that he wasn’t getting it from dulcimer players.  He was getting it from mandolin players, banjo players, and guitar players.  So I started listening to mandolin, banjo and guitar players.  I started stealing licks and ideas from them.  Really that is a big influence on the way that I play. 

DID YOU EXPERIMENT WITH TUNING

You know I never really did.  I did at the very beginning.  After I had been playing for about a year, I was asked to play at a church function and it was awful.  I was retuning between every song.  The one comment that really stabbed me was that someone said, “You ought to learn how to do that in one tuning.”  Doing it all in one tuning changes the way to look at things.  You can’t do everything on the melody string.  That has always been one of my goals to not retune.

WHERE DID YOUR FIRST DULCIMER COME FROM

  My first dulcimer was built in Korea.  I bought it from a music store, it was a great music store in Norfolk, Virginia – it is no longer there.  They had the really nice hand crafted dulcimers and then they had the one from Korea.  My parents bought the one from Korea because it was like, $120 and the others were $200 minimum.  My next dulcimer was a Blue Lion. 

MOVE TO NASHVILLE

 I am an Art Director.  I run the art department for a printing company.  The move to Nashville was for a couple of reasons.  I couldn’t get a job in art in Richmond, which was becoming real clear.  One day I went to one of these Nashville talent things and the guy heard me play and he said, “You ought to go to Nashville.”  So I started looking at the city and realized that printing was the number one industry.  Also if you draw a circle around Nashville, about 10 hours out, you will see that every dulcimer festival that I wanted to go to was in that circle.  When you draw one around Richmond, about half of that is in the ocean. 

 When I moved to Nashville I knew one person, she was a dulcimer player – Sandy Canatser.  I had met her at Boone.  She introduced me to David, who had been listening to my recordings –I found out later.  So he knew me immediately.  Then I met Steve Seifert who was living in Murfeesboro.  So I have incredible dulcimer players all around me.  I also found out that there was a growing dulcimer scene in Nashville.  We have a club there of about 30 members.  Last year we had our first festival.  There is a real dulcimer thing happening there.

TAPE CD

 I have two recordings that I have done.  I have the band recording.  It is pretty much out of print at this point.  I also have a CD.    (editor’s note: the name of the CD is Wire & Wood)

 Two years ago, David Schnaufer had the idea to put together a quartet of four dulcimers.  Not just four dulcimers playing together but actually playing parts, working like a string quartet.  So he put myself and Sandy Canatser, Natasha Dean  and Linda Sack together and started working with us as a quartet.  We started working on four part arrangements of different pieces of music.  And our repertoire as this point has grown into classical music, old time music and pretty much whatever we wanted to play.  Some of David’s original stuff and we’re working on a CD right now – we have about a third of it recorded.  We are hoping for a Christmas release.  We are really excited for what we have heard.  You know, being in a quartet, when you are concentrating on what to do, when you have got to go in and come and when you are listening just really for your cues, you are not really hearing what the whole sound is like.  It was a real experience the first time we recorded.  We got to go back and listen to ourselves through the monitors, we were great.  It was one of those experiences, “Wow! Who are they?” 

WHAT TUNING DO THE NASHVILLE FOLKS USE

Pretty much DAD.  I pretty much stick with DAD tuning.  Basically because the way I play, I do a lot of cross picking.  You know, you’ve got Ds an octave apart so you can play a full octave scale across the strings before you ever start going up the melody string.  So if you go up the melody string, depending what frets you have beyond the 7^th fret, like my dulcimer has a three and a half octave range – which is a big range for a dulcimer.  Most people only use about two octaves and sometimes only one.  But with a three and half octave range I can do all kinds of stuff.  But the other tunings – there are other tunings that I have fallen in love with for certain things.  You know, I play a reverse DAA tuning that I really like a lot – where I tune the bass string down to A and the melody strings at D.  So you can play in E minor and A and you get that really deep rich drone going.  DAA – I really haven’t done much with for a long time.  Basically it is just because anything that I can play in DAA, I can play in DAD – I just move it over. 

DO YOU HAVE ANY EXTRA FRETS

 On some dulcimers I do.  On this dulcimer that I play on stage – I don’t.  I have a chromatic bass dulcimer.  And I have a couple of dulcimers that have a one and a half fret, one is a baritone dulcimer.  Where that comes in handy, if I am playing in D, the dulcimer is tuned AEA, so  if I am playing in D and I want to hit a G chord, I don’t have to stretch too far to do it.  I can hit that pretty comfortably with that extra fret.  I have one regular dulcimer with an extra fret on it and I do some stuff with that.  But for the most part, everything I do, I do on this dulcimer with a standard fret board. 

ADVICE TO BEGINNERS

Play the thing – no matter how you tune it.  If you want to tune all of the strings to the same note – you can do that.  Just play.  Really get comfortable with it.  http://www.geocities.com/~leerowe158

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Interview with Joe Jewell    by Jerry L. Wright

            If you attended the Lone Star State Dulcimer Festival in Glen Rose in 1999 – you will remember the energetic performance of Joe and his friends.  Later in the summer we went to Mountain View, Arkansas and visited with Joe.  We gathered around his dining table and visited – here is what he had to say:

I was born and raised in Annapolis, Maryland.  I left there in 1966, in the blizzard of ’66 to be exact.  I shoveled my way out and moved to the Florida Keys.  I lived there – had a business – until about 1988 when I sold the business.  I went sailing for a couple of years.  We had a farm here in Mountain View, Arkansas and after sailing a little bit, we decided to sail the boat and move to the farm and we have been here ever since. 

          I have played music ever since I was in the Navy.  I was in the Navy, in fact I just found the web site to my old ship, the USS William M. Wood, which was a destroyer, and I came across a buddy who helped teach me the guitar.  He went on to become a professional guitarist and a gospel singer and recorded eight albums.  He has since become a minister.  I was a Corpsman in the Navy and sat in sickbay every night and a bunch of us would play the same six songs over and over.  We were playing country songs – a lot of Chet Atkins. 

          I got married not too long after I got out of the Navy.  A buddy of mine had also recently gotten out of the Army.  He was a drummer.  Shortly thereafter we had formed a band playing rhythm and blues and rock and roll in Annapolis.  Over the course of four years we built up to a nine piece band and we recorded a tune on the Jamie label.  Dwayne Eddie recorded on Jamie.  Anyway, for a while we were kinda locally popular and then we opened for the Dave Clark Five in 1965 in the Baltimore Civic Center – 10,500 screaming teenagers.  We wore Beatle boots and had Beatle haircuts.  The name of our band was Barry and the Vikings.  Barry was the lead singer and I played guitar. 

          In 1974 a husband and wife that were good friends of mine started a little band.  We started doing country and light pop rock.  Then he wanted someone to play banjo in a commercial that he had written.  The next thing I know, I was playing 5 string banjo – I was playing in a Bluegrass band within a year.  Later I started playing mandolin with an Irish and old timey group. 

          Then I started playing with a group in Key West.  We did art gallery openings and stuff like that but we also played on the streets and docks of Key West.  Then one year not too long after that, this fellow came down to the docks with a hammer dulcimer.  Every afternoon he would come with two cans of beer, a box of tapes and sit down and play.  He would make $150 every afternoon.  I would watch him and I decided that is what I had to learn to play.  My wife bought me one for my birthday when I was 42.  It was a Beria dulcimer built in Cosby, Tennessee. 

          A blind man in Seymour, Missouri – Frank Ergos who was tutored by Russell Cook built my second hammer dulcimer.  He was totally blind and made his living as a finish carpenter, hung doors, built stairs, built cabinets.  He had a shop with every power tool that you could think of.  The shop had no windows in it of course because he didn’t need light.  It was an amazing thing.  He and his wife played in a Bluegrass band.  He played the fire out of a banjo and mandolin and guitar.  He also sang. He built hammer dulcimers but he couldn’t play them because he couldn’t touch them.  I bought this dulcimer in Mountain View at a dulcimer festival but I went up to Seymour to pick it up. That is when it hit me.  When I went to his house his wife told me that he was in the shop working.  He had this nice metal building with no windows in it.  As I walked up to the front door of the shop – there were no lights on.  There was a saw running inside there – it was a cave – that’s when it hits you.  He then heard me.  He turned the saw off and walked over and turned on the lights. 

Within a year he was dead.  He had cancer as an infant and the radiation that he took blinded him.  Then the cancer came back.  He never used a walking stick, he never used a dog.  He usually had one scab on his forehead from walking into things – he was very independent.  He was a nice guy.  His wife still plays. 

I started doing the Renaissance Fair in the Florida Keys about a year after I started playing dulcimer.  I auditioned for the Sarasota Renaissance Festival and I got the job.  One day, in my tip jar, I found a card from the entertainment director of the Texas Renaissance Festival and he had written on it, “Please call me.”  I called him and he said, “I have watched you for two days and I want you to come down and do my show.”  I ended up doing the Renaissance Festival circuit for four full years, nine months out of the year we were on the road.  I still do a few shows. 

I moved here in the winter of 1991.  When the spring came we had met an old fiddler, Gaylon Green, I started playing guitar with him.  One thing led to another and soon I was involved with the Folk Center. 

Interview with Joe Newberry   June 2008  Mars Hill, North Carolina by Jerry L. Wright

I currently live in Durham, North Carolina.  I was born in Missouri.  I came to NC when I was 24.  I came here to visit a friend and my car broke down.  I got a job to pay for the car and then I started seeing that there was a lot there.  I fell into a beautiful community of old time music and friends so I decided to stay. 

Right now I am employed by the State of North Carolina.  I am the Public Information Officer for the Department of Cultural Resources.  I serve at the pleasure of our governor and the secretary of the department.  A normal day would range from going to give a speech about how arts and culture make our state vital and strong.  I deal with press inquiries.  I also help pitch story ideas to fashionable magazines, CBS News and NPR.  It is a great job and a great mission. 

My family has always been a singing family on the Newberry side and on my mother’s side they were singers and dancers.

My grandfather Newberry was a hunting and fishing companion to Vance Randolph  – he was the premier folk music collector of the Ozarks.  They were very good friends.  Vance spent, literally, his whole career collecting Ozark tales and music.  My grandfather never met a stranger and was a Baptist minister and so he and Vance would always go hunting and fishing together.

My family would sing on every car trip, we sang after supper.  Anytime we would all get together we would sing the old songs.  We would sing ballads.  My family sang a version of Barbra Allen  that I have never heard.  It was very important to my dad to pronounce the words correctly.  Narrow was narra.  The rose wrops around the briar.  It was very important to my dad. 

We didn’t use instruments, we just sang.  We would do everything from sacred numbers to ballads to cowboy stuff to some popular songs of the day. 

It’s funny, the first time I ever went on a car trip with another family; I remember thinking, “When does the singing start?”  They never sang a note and so it made me realize - we are a little different.

When I was 14 there was a real cute little girl down the street who was taking guitar lessons and so partly to hang out with her but also to be able to play the songs at night that my family sang – I started taking guitar lessons. 

Then I was as the Boone County Fair in Missouri.  I was about 16.  I was walking through the grand stands and a fiddle contest was going on.  I thought it was the coolest thing that I had ever heard.  There were Missouri fiddlers up there just going at it.  I just had to have it so I started hanging out with them.  I started going to fiddle contest.  When I was in college I moved into a student coffeehouse.  I was one of the managers.  There were six old time musicians.  We would run different programs. 

I started playing banjo when I was twenty.  I started playing fiddle a little after that. 

I played with  Tommy Jarrell  a couple of times and hung out at his house once or twice and mostly in big groups.  I am not gregarious.  I thought, “You know he probably has as many friends in their twenties as he can handle.”  So I was happy to hear him play.  My friend, Andy Cobb and I were just glad to be around him.

My beloved friend was Ralph Blizzard.  Ralph was fun.  Ralph was what a musician should be.  He never said anything but, “Did you bring your instrument?” 

I was up in Massachusetts at a camp when Benton Flippen and his wife Lois came walking up.  Lois said, “He ain’t played with you all week and he wants to.”  Benton just shook his head.  We played all night. 

Benton doesn’t say much but when he does it is often very funny.  We were standing in front of Benton’s old green van with the awning at Mount Airy .  Someone walked by with a washtub bass and as they walked on by Benton said, “If that is all I had to play I’d stay home.”  I fell out. 

The Horse Flies from Ithaca put Benton’s Dream on one of their albums and that is when that tune started getting out. 

The music has taken me half way around the world.  I have gone as far as Australia.  I have met people like you and Margaret.  I would not have met you if I didn’t play music.  I was honored by singing with some friends at Janette Carter’s funeral .  I never dreamed that I would have that honor.  I can’t imagine life without the music.  I am truly a lucky man. 

Joe Newberry

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