Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions

The Appalachian dulcimer is one of America's major contributions to world music and folk art. Handmade and played by people with no formal knowledge of music, this beautiful instrument entered the folk revival following World War II with virtually no written record. Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions tells the fascinating story of the effort to recover the instrument's lost heritage through fieldwork in the Southern mountains, finding old instruments, and listening to the tales of old folks. After reviewing the dulcimer's distinctive musical features, Ralph Lee Smith presents a chronological story from the German Renaissance instrument called a Scheitholt to the dulcimer in America-describing the development of distinctive dulcimer styles in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. The tale continues into the twentieth century, through a final group of tradition-based Appalachian makers whose work flowed into the national scene of the folk revival.

Ralph Lee Smith is a leading authority on the history of the Appalachian dulcimer and is a performer and teacher of traditional American folk music. He is the author of Folk Songs of Old Virginia (2009) and Greenwich Village. The Happy Folk Singing days, 1950s and 1960s (2008), as well as the first edition of Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions (Scarecrow,1997).