Read Online Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions by Ralph Lee Smith - Free Book Online

report, Burnette-Dean says that Wythe County received the largest number of Germans of any county south of Augusta County, which is halfway down the Virginia Valley.
    The Germans tended to settle near each other, forming communities. One of these was in the Cripple Creek area of Wythe County, where some 75 German families settled prior to the American Revolution. Burnette-Dean found five dulcimer-owning families in this area, with John Stanger (1775–1848) being the connection among all of them.
    Burnette-Dean observed that, of the owners of the 39 dulcimers, 24 came from the British Isles and 15 from the various German-speaking kingdoms and states (Germany did not become a nation until 1870). However, there was a notable difference in the ownership patterns in the eastern and western counties. Of 11 dulcimers found in counties along the eastern side of the Blue Ridge, all but two were owned by families whose ancestors came from the British Isles. West of the Blue Ridge, the numbers were evenly split, with 13 owned by British Isles families and 13 by German families.
    I have to confess that this substantial early German ownership of dulcimers surprised me, and it raises many questions that the reader can ponder. A few of the instruments may have been scheitholt/zitters, but the total absence of the word zitter in the records of German owners raises lots of doubt. The evidence strongly suggests that true dulcimers existed by 1818, the year of their earliest appearance in the courthouse records that Burnette-Dean examined.
    However, what her findings render uncertain is whether the scenario I had envisioned—that English, Scottish, or Irish settlers were the ones who changed the scheitholt into the dulcimer—is accurate. Maybe some ingenious Germans made the change, and then those famous borrowers, the Scotch-Irish, up to their usual thing, helped themselves! What is clear, however, is that the German presence faded away as the 19th century progressed, and the instrument domiciled itself in the English-speaking world.
    After the two 1818 instruments, the number of instruments that Bur-nette-Dean found, by decade, was as follows: 1820–1829, 9; 1830–1839, 7; 1840–1849, 13; 1850–1859, 8. Prices for the instruments in sales records ran from 12½ cents to $2.50, in the same general range as the Kentucky dulcimers cited by Gifford, thus reinforcing his conclusion that the instruments were not hammered dulcimers. Few owners of the dulcimers had significant assets and none were rich. Of the 39 owners, 26 had estates with a total value of less than $1,000. The dulcimer’s home was among people of modest, sometimes very modest, means.
    A fascinating question is whether any of the family names of dulcimer owners that Burnette-Dean found in the 1780–1860 estate records, or of purchasers of dulcimers at estate sales, appear among later 19th-century or early 20th-century makers, owners, or players. Was the interest, and perhaps even an instrument or two, passed down?
    For example, one of the entries in Burnette-Dean’s listing of owners, from Wythe County, reads:
One dulcimer was found in the 1848 estate of Jacob SPANGLER. He was born in Wythe County in 1789 in the Cripple Creek area. His family came from Germany to Pennsylvania to Wythe. He was married to Sally Stanger. His estate was valued at $763.76. His dulcimer was valued at $1.00 and was spelled “dulcimer.”
    Another Wythe County record reads:
One dulcimer was found in the 1853 estate of John SPANGLER. He was born in Wythe County, VA. He was the son of Jacob Spangler. He was married to Catherine Harner. His family was from Germany. His estate was valued at $510.72. His dulcimer was valued at $1.95 and was spelled “dulcimore.”
    The name Spangler also turns up in connection with Cecil Sharp’s and Maud Karpeles’s 1916–1918 field collecting trip to Appalachia. In 2004, the English Folk Dance and Song