Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions (20 page)

Initially, there was little demand among local people for the Glenns' instruments. However, in the 1950s, several local retail establishments accepted dulcimers from them, and the results pleased everybody. Sales received double impetus from the folk revival and from the ever-increasing influx of tourists to what was becoming a favored vacation area. Stores in the Boone/Blowing Rock area that sold Glenn dulcimers included Ray Farthing's furniture store, Bob Harmon's Godwin Weaving Shop, the Log House, and Walker's jewelry store. On the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Northwest Trading Post at Glendale Springs also took in some instruments. They moved right out into tourists' cars, and the Trading Post reordered.

Figure 7.3. Glenn dulcimers.
Left,
North Carolina pattern, made by Clifford Glenn in 1979.
Center,
Hicks pattern, made by Leonard Glenn to be sold by Frank Profitt, c. 1963.
Right,
Kentucky pattern, made by Leonard, 1979.

Throughout this period, Leonard and Clifford continued to farm, making dulcimers and banjos in the wintertime. By the 1970s, their sales volume and reputation had reached the point at which they no longer needed to sell in the shops. From that time forward, they conducted their business from their homes, selling directly to customers who ranged from local buyers to enthusiasts in Japan.

Leonard played both dulcimer and banjo, and so does his son. Maybelle, too, plays the dulcimer. Clifford and Maybelle sometimes play duets, with Leonard playing the banjo.

Leonard said that Nineveh Presnell played his dulcimer with a noter—“probably a match stem,” he said. Leonard played “a little” with a noter, but then abandoned it. When I asked him about it, he held up his thumb, grinned, and said, “There's my noter!” Clifford also used a noter for a while, then switched to his fingers. Maybelle uses a matchstick.

For strumming, Leonard used a piece of TV lead-in wire with the wire removed from the center. “I like my pick to be pretty limber,” he said.

Clifford says that songs that he has known “as long as I can remember” include “Cripple Creek,” “Old Joe Clark,” “Sourwood Mountain,” “Lonesome Road Blues,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “Groundhog.”

As is described in chapter 5, I acquired a Prichard dulcimer in 1988. In June 1991, with my Pritchard dulcimer in a cloth case, I traveled up the mountain road to the Glenns with a busload of people who were attending the Annual Dulcimer Playing Workshop at Appalachian State University. In Clifford's small living room, with workshop attendees crammed into every available bit of space, I removed the Prichard dulcimer from its case. Clifford held up a dulcimer he had just made, and we pressed the two instruments together, back to back. It was a nearly perfect match. There was an audible gasp from the thrilled audience. It was almost as if the Stranger had entered the room after more than a hundred years to say, “Yes, you've got it right!”

That night I thought about the Stranger for many hours. I conjured up the scene of his arrival, of his conversation with Eli and America Presnell, and of the unpacking of his horse.

ELI:
What's that?
STRANGER:
That's a delcymore.
ELI:
Can you play it?
STRANGER:
Wouldn't pack 'er if I couldn't pick 'er!
America:
I'd love to hear it. Bring it in!

On April 3, 1997, Leonard Glenn, who played the key role in bringing the Stranger's legacy to dulcimer lovers everywhere, passed away. Clifford Glenn continued to make dulcimers for a few more years, and then retired.

Edd Presnell, son of Nathan and Lindy Presnell, was born on January 24, 1916. The family lived about a mile from the place where Edd established his own home and workshop. Nathan was a farmer and miller who operated a water-powered grist mill on the Watauga River.

On March 17, 1935, when he was 19, Edd Presnell married 17-year-old Nettie Hicks, daughter of Ben and Julie Hicks and sister of Nathan Hicks. Edd and Nettie visited a magistrate in the evening to get their license. The magistrate obligingly rousted out a preacher at 11 o'clock at night to marry them. The preacher charged 50 cents. It added up to less than a penny a year for the years of their devoted and remarkable partnership.

Nettie's family gave the couple 129 acres of mountain land, and Edd became a farmer, a profession that he followed until about 1965, when woodcarving and dulcimer-making began to bring in enough money to pay the bills.

Edd and Nettie had four children—Saskie Lucille (born 1937), Baxter (born 1938), Julie Ellen (born 1941), and Marthana (born 1950). Baxter inherited the family woodworking skills. He attended Berea College for three years, then returned and built a house near his parents' home. He did not make dulcimers, but produced a wide range of decorative wood carvings and wood jewelry. By the 1960s, Baxter Presnell was a full-fledged partner with his parents in a business that included the sale of dulcimers and woodcarvings.

Presnell's Early Instruments

Edd Presnell's first dulcimer, which he made in 1936 shortly after his marriage to Nettie, was patterned after the Ben Hicks instrument that is illustrated in chapter 5. The dulcimer he made has been lost, and other early Presnell dulcimers from the 1930s and 1940s have similarly disappeared. Presnell made only a small number. “People used to say, ‘We got no use for that thing!'” he told me.

Presnell made his early instruments without power tools. He used an ax, handsaw, hammer, brace and bit, jackplane, and smoothing plane. He whittled the pegs and cut the heart-shaped sound holes with a piece of saw blade that had belonged to Ben Hicks.

For these early instruments, Presnell cut tops and bottoms from logs, using a handsaw or crosscut saw. They were often made from poplar logs from local log cabins. The sides were made of “wahoo,” a flexible magnolia wood that he cut and bent when it was green. He poured hot water over the pieces to facilitate bending and put them in a form until they were dry. The back was attached to the sides first, then the top, and then the head and fretboard were mounted.

The instruments were fretted with wire staple frets, whose placement was determined by ear. Like Homer Ledford, Presnell made some temporary frets, which he slid up and down the fretboard while plucking a string to determine the placement. There was no standard nut-to-bridge string span.

Developing His Own Pattern

Presnell soon made major modifications in Hicks's pattern. By the 1940s, he had evolved the beautiful narrow instrument that became his trademark. He settled on a 29-inch vibrating string length, an inch longer than the old hourglass dulcimer patterns of both West Virginia/North Carolina and the Cumberlands. His pattern, Jean Ritchie said in
The Dulcimer Book
, looks “curiously like those of Ed Thomas.”

In 1992, when Edd Presnell was a featured guest at the Legendary Dulcimer Maker's Forum at the Annual Dulcimer Players' Workshop at Appalachian State University, and I was the moderator, I asked him the big question:

M
ODERATOR
:
Did you know Jethro Amburgey?

P
RESNELL
:
Yes, I knew him.

M
ODERATOR
:
Was the shape and pattern of your instruments influenced in any way by Jethro and his instruments?

P
RESNELL
:
Not to my knowledge. I developed my pattern myself.

I have no doubt of the honesty of his answer.

In the latter half of the 1950s, things began to happen for Presnell. The folk and craft revivals were taking hold, and Presnell's dulcimers became part of it.

In 1956, folklorist Richard Chase launched a once-a-week folk festival at the
Horn in the West
summer outdoor drama in Boone, North Carolina. Presnell came with his dulcimers, and sold some. Also, he joined the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild in Asheville, North Carolina, which, in the 1950s, operated outlets in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Knoxville as well as Asheville. The guild sent Presnell dulcimers to its outlets, and the instruments sold. Other shops in New York, California, and Wisconsin began to place orders.

Invitations began to arrive to exhibit and sell his instruments at local and regional craft shows and craft fairs, which became increasingly popular in the 1950s. Nettie, who had learned to play the dulcimer from her father, Ben Hicks, when she was a child in the 1920s, brushed up her playing skills, accompanied her husband to the shows and fairs, and showed people how to play.

Presnell bought some power tools and set up a workshop. Sometime in the latter part of the 1950s, he also began to number his instruments— beginning with no. 1, so the numbers do not reflect those instruments that he made before the numbering began. The total of instruments that he made during the prenumbering days was not large, though. Presnell's last numbered instrument was no. 1,890, which he completed early in 1994.

During the period 1960–1965, Presnell discontinued shipping dulcimers to craft shops and sold only at craft fairs and from his home. At the time that he discontinued shipping instruments to the shops, orders from the shops for 25 dulcimers were sitting on his table. Business leveled off, but Presnell had all he needed and could handle. He never advertised, but information about his dulcimers ultimately reached around the world. Presnell dulcimers went to such places as Germany, Japan, and Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo).

In the 1970s, I visited Edd and Nettie several times. Getting there was an adventure all by itself. I passed through the little village of Valle Crucis, and then took North Carolina Route 194, which winds steeply up the mountainside and includes several astonishing hairpin curves. (When I drove this road with my 12-year-old daughter Koyuki and her school friend Erin in 1990, neither of them wanted to look.) Arriving at a plateau at the top, I turned right, and soon arrived at a sign advising “Pavement Ends.” From there, it was a beautiful drive over several miles of dirt and gravel roads, crossing a stream on a log bridge in the mottled sunlight, and passing fabulous vistas of mountain scenery. The road also included several big ruts and boulders that slowed me to a creep.

Finally, I arrived at a turnoff marked by a small carved wooden sign reading, “The Presnells.” On my right, on the side of the downward-sloping hill, stood a weathered old house. I didn't learn until later that it was the house that Nathan Hicks had built in 1914 (see chapter 5), and in which Ray and Rosa Hicks and their son, Ted, lived. The road took me for another mile along the crest of a ridge and ended at a simple brick ranch house of early postwar design. The house looked out on endless mountain vistas. On the left was the wooden building that housed Presnell's shop. A dog of thoroughly mixed lineage came out to greet me, wagging his tail, and Presnell stood inside the house's screen door, smoking his curved pipe, which snuggled into his beard, and smiling a greeting. Figure 7.4 shows Edd and Nettie on one of our early visits.

Figure 7.4. Edd Presnell in 1978, holding a six-string dulcimer that he made for his wife, Nettie, who is on the right, holding the author's infant daughter, Koyuki. The author is on the left.

When I visited in 1976, Presnell had recently cut down an apple tree near his house and had made an apple wood dulcimer for a customer in Pittsburgh. Apple trees are small and can provide only a few boards long enough for the sides and back of a dulcimer, but there was enough wood left from this tree to make a couple more instruments. I ordered one, and Presnell made dulcimer no. 1,266, dated August 29, 1976, which is the instrument in the middle in figure 7.5. This dulcimer illustrates Presnell's standard pattern.

While Presnell's dulcimer-making trade grew, so did his fame as an Appalachian woodcarver. Pictures of him with his woodcarvings appeared in
National Geographic
and many other magazines. Increasingly from the 1970s on, at the customer's request, Presnell carved decorative patterns and motifs on the top and fretboard of his instruments, carved the pegs in the shape of dogwood flowers and birds, and even inlaid flowers. Beginning in the 1980s, Nettie began to execute some of the carving on the top panels. These instruments are jointly signed by Edd and Nettie Presnell.