Conversations With Mountain Dulcimer Players

I first met Dan Evans at the Nonsuch Dulcimer Club's annual weekend, at Launde Abbey, 3 years ago when I was starting out on dulcimer. A very sociable and helpful guy, as well as a very thorough tutor, I was delighted when, last year, he came to teach at the Nonsuch Spring Fling in Allendale, Northumberland (which I now help Liz Conway to organise). Dan began by telling me about his musical background: I played mandolin in a school folk band and then at university jamming to Dylan, Lindisfarne & folk classics – I no longer play mandolin – the frets are too close together for me now. I’m a guitarist – I play folk airs and original pieces in Open C tuning. (Steve: have a listen to "She Moves Through the Fair!" for a beautiful example:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSQrHYKMXWI ) I followed on from John Martyn (my favourite artist of all time) for many years, I was the only guitarist I knew of in the world who built layers of sound with different textures u...

Doug is a dulcimer maker and musician living in Michigan. He started his musical adventures as a piano player with rock bands when a teenager, then became interested in folk music when he was 15. He began playing mountain dulcimer at 17, which was around 1974. Around then he also started playing tin whistle and not long after that hammered dulcimer. He also plays clawhammer banjo and dabbles with a few other instruments.  Doug started building dulcimers soon after learning to play them. Steve: You have a few more years experience on the dulcimer than me, Doug. I was learning guitar in 1971. Although I heard the dulcimer over here in the UK around then, I only began to play approx. three and a half years ago. Can I ask you what first drew you to the MD? Doug: I heard a folksinger named Ed Badeaux play a mountain dulcimer when I was 15 and had an unexplainable attraction to the instrument. It took me a year or so to find a dulcimer. There was no internet and Ne...

Karen lives in Rockville MD, just outside Washington DC USA. I started out asking her if that was the Rockville in the R.E.M. song "Don't go back to Rockville"? This is what Karen had to say: I wasn’t familiar with this song, but a little internet sleuthing, and indeed it’s one and the same. Here’s what I found at https://genius.com/Rem-dont-go-back-to-rockville-lyrics : “This song was written in 1980 by Mike Mills to convince his then-girlfriend Ingrid Schorr, a student at UGA, not to return to her hometown of Rockville, Maryland for the summer. Since the song’s release, Ingrid Schorr has written about the factual inaccuracies of the song. While rendering the song technically false, her testimony gives insight into the true nature of the song. Since Mills knows nothing about the town, he’s invented a kind of worst-case-scenario that his girlfriend will return home to, hoping that she’ll start believing this and decide she wants to stay with him.” Steve: S...