Ralph Lee Smith at Common Ground on the Hill, Westminster, Md., July 2011

On the last day of his mountain dulcimer traditions classes during the second week of Common Ground on the Hill, dulcimer historian Ralph Lee Smith brought several antique instruments from his collection. At the end of the session, he was presented with a Common Ground shirt by members of the afternoon class.

Ralph Lee Smith opens gift shirt
Ralph taught two classes at Common Ground, one on the "world of the mountain dulcimer" and one on ballads. Both were heavily, although not exclusively, based on ballad collecting by Cecil Sharp, Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell between 1907 and 1917. And Ralph brought to Common Ground his knowledge of how the mountain dulcimer developed during the 19th and 20th centuries.

He also brought his collection of dulcimers ...

In photo above, Ralph chats with a member of the class. To the left are several hourglass dulcimers from Kentucky, along with one of similar shape from East Tennessee, all from the 20th century. To the right (mostly obscured by the bottom edge of the photo), are early instruments from West Virginia and Virginia; while the provenance is uncertain on most of the instruments, they most likely date from the early 20th to mid-19th centuries.

Kentucky (and one from Tennessee). From left, a non-traditional early folk revival instrument by Bill Davis of Gatlinburg, Tenn., and hourglass dulcimers by Kentuckians Warren May of Berea; Homer Ledford, of Winchester; Jethro Amburgey (two instruments, one behind the other), of Knott County, and "Uncle Ed" Thomas, also of Knott County. (The Davis, the Ledford and one of the Amburgeys are mine; the others are Ralph's.) Amburgey and Thomas both made instruments for the Hindman Settlement School. Note how similar all the Kentucky instruments are in shape.

Transitional instruments from Virginia. (Others in Ralph's collection are on loan to the Blue Ridge Institute, Ferrum, Va.) From left, an early Galax dulcimer; a home-made instrument that Ralph dates from about 1875; and a "coffin-shaped" dulcimer and a Scheitholt or Pennsylvania German-style folk zither, both dating from the 19th century. Ralph's hypothesis is that the dulcimer evolved by stages from German folk zithers brought to southwestern Virginia by Pennsylvania Dutch settlers.

One from West Virginia and one from North Carolina. To Ralph's right, in lower left foreground, are a dulcimer made in the 1960s by Leonard Glenn of Watauga County, N.C., and in the late 19th-century by Charles Prichard of Huntington, W.Va. As Ralph explains in his books, the pattern was brought to North Carolina by a traveling salesman during the 1880s and copied by artisans in the Glenn family for the next hundred years.

A sweet little tangent. Ralph let us play some of the instruments (i.e. the ones that can be played ... some of the others are long past that point)! I played both the Prichard, which Ralph often plays in concerts, and the boxy little Virginia style dulcimer dated 1875. It's heavy, and it looks like it was slapped together out of barn wood and decorated with house paint. But Ralph has it strung Galax style (to dddd or in unison to D an octave above middle C), and after adjusting the friction pegs a little, I was able to get a clear, sweet ringing tone out of it. I got out one of my floppy yogurt-tub picks and a noter made from the round end of a Starbucks coffee stirrer, and I couldn't keep my hands off it!