About My Musical Background

Among other things, I'm a musician from North Carolina, specializing in Appalachian dulcimer, guitar, and things with strings. (Professionally, I currently work as a web developer and college instructor.)

I live in Louisiana at the moment.

For what it's worth, here's a bit of personal history, touching primarily upon my musical background. Folks sometime ask how I came to play dulcimer, since it seems to them to be a slightly unusual pastime, so that's the main focus.

The "Early Years"

I was born 1971 in rural eastern North Carolina. I grew up in a small town called Warsaw. You can probably imagine the rest at least as compellingly as I could tell it, so I'll leave it to mostly to your fancy. Suffice it to say that although I listened to a lot of music as a youngster, my primary interests revolved around tinkering, computing, sculpting & claymation, and basketball.

Musical Background

A fan of Bruce Springsteen, I first learned to play harmonica when I was in high school circa 1987. I used to take a Walkman out into the woods in order to play harp along with songs like "The Promised Land" and "The River." My eldest brother Bill introduced me to Howlin' Wolf around this time; the Wolf's songs quickly became the basis of my forest practice sessions.

Mind you, I had to play in the woods because my harp playing sounded so bad.

Now, in those days, my middle brother, Andy, had already been playing acoustic guitar for years (I believe he started in junior high — he's six years older than me, so you do the math). He had (and still has) an inimitable intuitive approach to the instrument that was light years beyond what I could aspire to at the time, but I went ahead and got a guitar anyway and commenced to learn the few chords necessary to play things like "Nebraska" (Springsteen) and "All Along the Watchtower" (Dylan via U2). I even got a harp rack and worked at augmenting my weak beginner's guitar playing with my slowly improving harmonica.

Dulcimer, Ho

Having lived years in flatland eastern North Carolina, my family was big on taking vacations to the Appalachian mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. Towards the end of my senior year, my dad actually moved to Asheville, with my mom and I following within a few months. Our mountain relocation dovetailed nicely with my burgeoning interest in folk music, and in the summer of 1989, I picked up a Folkcraft dulcimer from a shop in Pigeon Forge, TN. Somehow missing out on the fact that most people tuned dulcimers DAD, I instead strung mine up for a GDD tuning. With no web to scour for how-to information, I looked for dulcimer documentation everywhere that my parents and I went on our explorations that summer.

Luckily, I stumbled across a book that would be most influential in my dulcimer development: James Major's Dulcimer Chord Encylopedia. Not only did the charts in this tome suggest an approach to dulcimer playing distinct from the traditional melody string focus, but the sections on various modal tunings made it clear that there were lots of valid ways to tune a dulcimer. I quickly added a dorian (GDC), phrygian (GDBb), and mixolydian (GCC) tuning to my practices (you can learn more about how tunings relate to modes via my article on the subject).

During college, my interest in the dulcimer came to some early fruition when my fascination with the music of Jethro Tull led me and a good friend to sign up as "court musicians" in The Madrigral Dinner, an annual NCSU Theatre production. Our duty was to stroll about and regale the dining audience members with song. Since the guitar seemed anachronistic, I decided to put a strap upon my dulcimer and play it in an overhand style — though it wasn't a medieval instrument, it did look rather plausibly archaic. It was successful; my troop and I even ended up doing a featured original piece in the show with GDC-tuned dulcimer, flute, cello, and penny whistle.

That was it. Whatever else, I'd be, I'd be a dulcimer player. Not only was the comparatively unusual instrument an item of interest in any performance context, but I started to discover that it held surprising musical possibilities. The "limiting" diatonic fretboard, in conjunction with the various tunings, inspires original expression in the same way that different poetic meters channel language. Even better, getting the groove of the dulcimer changed my approach to instruments like guitars, leading me towards a more fulfilling incorporation of drones and alternate tunings that I pursue to this day.