Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions (18 page)

Amburgey said in a 1971 interview that he began to make dulcimers “'long about the last year of high school.” The likely time is therefore the fall of 1919 or the spring of 1920.

He followed Thomas's practice of dating and numbering most of his instruments. The earliest Amburgey so far found that has a number and date on a paper label inside the lower left sound hole is no. 18, dated May 16, 1929. This is the instrument beside the Prichard dulcimer in figure 6.1. It belonged to Margaret Motter, a graduate of Hood College and a teacher at Pine Mountain Settlement School from 1928 to 1932. Figure 6.4 shows Amburgey playing one of his dulcimers, and figure 6.5 shows two Am-burgey instruments: no. 90 made in 1938 and no. 467 made in 1961.

Figure 6.4. Jethro Amburgey playing one of his dulcimers. (Photographer unknown)

No. 467 is typical of many instruments made by Amburgey as his sales began to increase during the post–World War II folk revival. There is a symmetry problem in no. 467, and the pre–World War II purfling around the edge of the top is missing. The fretboard is somewhat wider than that of no. 90. The top and bottom are made of a thin laminate plywood. Over a period of time, Amburgey encountered significant problems with having the top and/or bottom panels of his dulcimers split. In the early 1940s, to solve the problem, he shifted to plywood for making the top panels and bottoms of his instruments.

Figure 6.5. Jethro Amburgey dulcimer no. 90, dated May 9, 1938 (left), and no. 467, dated May 31, 1961. James Still Collection, Morehead State University. (Eric Schindlebower, MSU Photographic Services)

In a 1963 interview for the Louisville Courier-Journal, Amburgey said, “I'm selling more dulcimers now than I ever thought of selling several years ago. . . . I ship them practically everywhere.” The price at that time was $35.

Orders continued to flood his mailbox. In February 1971, he made no. 1,191, which, at this writing, is in the possession of a relative, Renee Combs. According to one report, he completed no. 1,369 on November 25, 1971, the day he died, but if this instrument exists, its whereabouts are unknown, and Jethro's son Morris doubts that the report is correct.

Jethro Amburgey was a fine player. Morris says that his father used a long piece of paper, folded over several times, as a strummer. Photos taken at Hindman Settlement School also show him picking the strings with his fingers. According to Morris, his dad's favorite songs were “Barbara Allen” and “Bury Me Beneath the Willow.”

All buyers of Amburgey dulcimers, from the beginning to the end, received a genuine old-time Cumberland dulcimer in the original Thomas pattern. Amburgey always used the old short frets and string spacing that Thomas had been using a hundred years earlier, and no 6½ fret ever put in an appearance on his fretboard. Today, all Amburgey dulcimers are windows onto a vanished past.

It is a bit difficult to believe that there could be such a subject as the “politics of dulcimers,” but in fact there is. It is a subset of a lively field of academic debate that goes under the name of the “politics of culture.”

In essence, proponents of the politics-of-culture critique of society assert that people belonging to the nation's power elite who were ostensibly involved in helping less powerful social groups such as Appalachian mountaineers and Native Americans actually imposed their own notions and values on these cultures. Hard-liners say that these “helpers” gave crumbs to the disadvantaged, virtually as part of a conspiracy with other advantaged groups to fleece the parties that were ostensibly being helped. Proponents of these views often believe in the broad explanatory power of a model of society whose predominating feature is a one-way street on which oppressors work their will on the oppressed.

Applying the critique to Hindman Settlement School and its interest in the dulcimer, critics offer the view that the administrators and teachers at Hindman did one or both of two things: They imposed prevailing upper-class cultural values on the mountain children and their parents, and/or they kept the mountaineers tranquilized with quaint things like dulcimers while the coal barons robbed them.

With regard to dulcimers, critics state that the administrators of the school chose the dulcimer over the banjo for priority in Hindman's activities because they preferred its gentility to the rowdy songs and social settings with which the banjo was associated. This constitutes what poli-tics-of-culture advocates call
cultural imposition.

We can begin by acknowledging two facts. First, romantic attitudes toward the Appalachian mountain people were widely prevalent among the nation's more literate and educated classes during the first half of the 20th century, and the dulcimer became associated with these romantic ideas. Second, these notions were often related to a belief in the racial superiority of native Anglo-Saxon stock over that of people from other nations and cultures.

Mountaineers were seen as sharing in that intrinsic superiority. Although currently in reduced circumstances, they were nevertheless “cousins of Lincoln.” Folklorists such as Jean Thomas and novelists such as John Fox Jr.—in his book The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, published in 1903 and one of the first American books to sell over a million copies— couldn't find flowery enough language to describe these highland sons and daughters of Merrie Englande. For that matter, neither could Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the West.

It followed that mountaineers had dropped behind the procession simply as a result of unfortunate historical accidents. All they needed to take their rightful place among America's Mayflower families and power elite was a decent education and a bit of opportunity. Educated and empowered, they might even serve as a welcome bulwark against the tide of foreign immigration.

Much of this dithering is silly, and plenty of it is reprehensible. With all these things granted, there remain ample grounds to believe that the class-struggle model of the politics of culture will produce results that are hardly an improvement in terms of accurately describing what really happens. The model of an all-powerful segment of society working its cultural will on groups that cannot resist combines sympathy for the allegedly powerless people with a condescendingly low opinion of their capability for relating to external cultural forces in their environment.

Folklorist Lucy Long, in her Ph.D. thesis “The Negotiation of Tradition” cited in the preceding chapter, is among many scholars who believe that the cultural-imposition model is flawed. The model, she believes, “tends to portray Appalachian culture as adulterated by outside intervention. The interactions between outsiders and mountain natives, however, have always been a two-way dialogue.” In contact between cultures, an interaction occurs in which both sides act and both possess leverage. Negotiation, not imposition, Long believes, is the concept that produces the most comprehensive and accurate description of what occurs in the interaction.

The Dulcimer and Banjo at Hindman

The belief that Hindman was biased against the banjo, and that its special interest in the dulcimer illustrates cultural imposition, runs into problems with the record. The banjo was in fact present and welcome at Hindman. In 1907, for example, at Katherine Pettit's suggestion, a teenage student named Ada B. Smith played “Barbara Allen” for visitors, accompanying herself on a homemade banjo. An old photograph shows four Hindman students with dulcimers and a fifth with a gourd banjo. Bias is hard to detect in statements such as the following, from Pettit's diary:

Some of the people thought it was wrong to have any kind of music but meetin' house songs. We mistakenly asked a young man to bring his banjo and give us some mountain music. A good sister hastened to urge us not to have “banjo pickin'” and said some of the people were saying that we could not be good if we liked it.

As the post-World War II folk revival began to gather momentum in the 1950s, awareness of the dulcimer spread rapidly in urban centers throughout the country. In Appalachia, several makers whose early dulcimers had been purely traditional modified their instruments to relate to the needs and wants of the growing ranks of new urban players and succeeded in developing markets. Changes included:

• substituting modern instrument fretting for old-style staple frets
  
• securing fully accurate fret patterns
  
• inserting a 6½ fret in their fretboards
  
• utilizing an increasing variety of woods
  
• using woods of contrasting colors for the back, sides, top, and fret-boards of their instruments
  

These refinements were made to basic patterns that derived directly from old and early traditions, and that remained fully recognizable when the makers had finished their modifications. These makers represent the final chapter of the story of the traditional dulcimer in the Appalachians. It is a wonderful last chapter.

Homer Ledford of Winchester, Kentucky, modified the old Cumberland dulcimer pattern in a number of ways over a period of years and carried it into the folk revival.

Ledford was born in 1927 in Ivyton, Tennessee, in the north-central part of the state, about 30 miles south of the Kentucky line. His father was a farmer; Homer was one of four children. His world was mountainous, with swinging bridges across crystal-clear streams. “We had a pretty hard time, you might say, as children,” Ledford said as we sat and talked in the parlor of his modest home on the day after Christmas in 1992. “We didn't have a lot.”

When Ledford was 12, his brother joined the Civilian Conservation Corps to bring in a little money for the family. “We finally got enough money to buy a battery radio,” Ledford says. “We listened to the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night until the battery went dead.”

Sometime around 1938, when Ledford was about 11 years old, he made his first musical instrument—a fiddle—out of a dynamite box, which he covered with matchsticks. It turned out that the glue that he ordered from a mail-order company wasn't very good, though, and the matchsticks fell off. In 1946 he tried again. He had read in the Sears Roebuck catalogue that fiddles were made of curly maple. He cut a piece from an old maple tree that grew in his father's hog lot, dried it in his mother's cookstove, and this time made a fiddle that stayed together and worked fine.

In 1946, after high school, Ledford received a scholarship to attend the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, while he recuperated from rheumatic fever. Then as now, the Campbell Folk School interested itself in mountain traditions, skills, and crafts. The school offered short courses in vegetable dyeing, pottery, folk dancing, folk singing, storytelling, and similar subjects that could be used in recreational programs at schools and colleges. Ledford remained at Campbell off and on for two and a half years. There he learned about dulcimers and made his first instruments.