Saturday, March 04, 2006

Historic Carolina dulcimer pattern

There's a picture of one of Clifford or Leonard Glenn's dulcimers in the current (March 2) issue of The Mountain Times, a weekly published in Boone, N.C. It's part of an exhibit "Instrument Builders of the Blue Ridge" in Boone put together by the Watauga County Arts Council and the Mazie Jones Gallery. Also pictured are some gorgeous fiddles.

“Leonard’s son—Clifford Glenn—he is now part of the older generation of instrument makers,” Mark Freed, folklorist for the Watauga County Arts Council, told The Times. "He is one of the last guys around who are making the old-time style of banjo and dulcimer.”

The dulcimer pictured is a pattern that's been in Glenn's family since the 1880s. Ralph Lee Smith, the dulcimer historian, has traced it to a maker named Charles Prichard who flourished in West Virginia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mine, which doesn't have the inlay around the soundholes that shows in the newspaper picture, is dated July 19, 2002. The Glenn family dulcimers' dimensions are exactly the same as one of Prichard's, as Ralph likes to demonstrate in classes at Western Carolina University.

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