Breathing Life Into Wood

For one weekend in October, Burnsville, North Carolina, will play host to the second year of a new festival celebrating a historic Appalachian tradition: handmade stringed instruments.

The Mountain Acoustics Luthier Invitational will bring music, art and woodworking to the picturesque downtown area October 23-25. Throughout the weekend, the work of 33 different luthiers will be on display in the Burnsville Town Center. 

Guitar-maker Bob Gramann is looking forward to the festival. He attended the inaugural event last year and thought it went well.

“You never know when you do one of these things whether or not it’s going to be worth your time and money to do it—when you go to a new show it’s an experiment,” Gramann said. “It was a reasonable crowd for the first year; I sold an instrument. … When you go to one of these things you either want make contacts so that you sell an instrument sometime in the next year, or you want to make orders at least.” 

For visitors, there will be a variety of activities available in addition to shopping for musical instruments. 

“There’s workshops that people can attend if they want private lessons or something like that,” festival director Chee Ammen said. “There is a silent auction that takes place as well—things that people have donated that people can bid on, including some really nice guitars.”

More information about the festival is available at mountainacoustics.com.

“This year something that’s new for the event is that we have a builder that has a collection of antique instruments, and there’s going to be a display of about 50 antique instruments,” Ammen said. “Some of them date back to the late 1800s.”

Host luthier Jay Lichty said that much of the appeal for craftsmen in attending an event like this one is just in the people they meet.

“The impact of shows from a luthier’s perspective is as much about the camaraderie between the luthiers and being together and sharing ideas as it is trying to sell our stuff,” Lichty said. “Of course, we’re trying to sell what we did just so we can build more, but one of the main things we get out of it is just the camaraderie.”

Gramann said he judges a show not just on whether or not it’s a professional success—it has to be fun. And the event last year was fun. Gramann is based in Fredericksburg, Va., and has been making guitars for nearly 30 years. He started work on his first instrument in the early 1990s.

“I had been maintaining my own instruments for a while, for all my life—I had been playing since I was 12,” Gramann said. “Building lots of little things but never a guitar. And I did a repair on one of my acoustic guitars that came out really well and I thought ‘Wow—why can’t I build a guitar?’”

Gramann is a folk singer and songwriter, so he had a vested interest in learning more about repairing and eventually making his own instruments. And historically, that has been a pattern for many luthiers in the Smoky Mountains region. The earliest luthiers in the region were often musicians who lacked access to new instruments. Music historian Mark Freed said that a sort of cottage industry developed early on in the mountains, with people teaching themselves to make instruments because they had no other option. 

“The early immigrants and settlers to the area, if they wanted to make music they had to literally make the music,” Freed said. “In Watauga County, we really got put on the map for instrument-building. Prior to when people could order an instrument from like a Sears-Roebuck catalog, that type of thing, you were on your own to make an instrument.”

Freed teaches music history and world music at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. Because these homemade instruments were built on a trial-and-error system rather than with a prepared design or formal training, they evolved their own unique characteristics not seen in other areas of the world.

“People made homemade fiddles, but maybe even more prevalent than that in this area, people made banjos and they made dulcimers, so much so that a particular style of banjo has become known as either the mountain-style fretless banjo or … the Proffitt-style mountain banjo,” Freed said. 

The mountain banjo was popularized outside the Southern Appalachians by Frank Proffitt, a folk musician who became prominent in the 1930s and ’40s and is particularly known for spreading the ballad (and history) of Tom Dooley. The other unique Appalachian contribution to the luthier’s art, the mountain lap dulcimer, is considered a type of zither, a traditional European instrument, but it differs significantly from other forms in other parts of the world. (The lap dulcimer is entirely different from the hammered dulcimer, even though they share a name.)

“Dulcimers sort of came into Pennsylvania and then down the great wagon road, and then into the mountain region,” Freed said. “But it was really not terribly widespread—Southwest Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, a little bit in East Tennessee and in Western North Carolina—so really just the heart of Central Appalachia was where the mountain dulcimer was built.” 

Freed has carefully researched the introduction of the mountain dulcimer into Watauga County, N.C., where Appalachian State is based. “It’s descended from a German instrument called the German scheitholt,” Freed said. “So the German scheitholt is like a dulcimer with straight edges on it.”

The scheitholt or scheitholz is considered the ancestor of both the mountain lap dulcimer and the modern zither. According to Freed, it was introduced by German immigrants traveling down the Great Wagon Road, an ancient path from the Philadelphia area that wound down through the Shenandoah Valley and eventually to the Piedmont area of North Carolina.

“There are stories about in our county about when the first dulcimer came into the area,” Freed said. “There were like two or three families that had some woodworking expertise who copied the pattern—took a piece of paper or something and copied the pattern of the shape of the instrument of this traveling troubadour and just started building them.” 

There is a lot of variety in the design of mountain dulcimers, but the design in Watauga, based on copying just this one instrument, became very popular in other areas of Western North Carolina. 

“Most of the ones that come from this county were hourglass shaped, had three strings, had hearts as sound holes,” Freed said. “And I would say that that’s probably similar to most of Western North Carolina’s dulcimers.”

It’s not uncommon for more modern luthiers to follow a similar path to learning the trade as those early craftsman in the pioneer-era Smoky Mountains. After deciding he was ready to move beyond just repairing his guitars, Gramann bought a guitar-building kit.

“I went up and I toured the Martin plant, and then bought one of their kits—which essentially is a box of wood, with very bad instructions—and brought it home,” Gramann said. C.F. Martin & Company, based in Pennsylvania, is one of the leading guitar manufacturers in the United States. “The instructions were quite insufficient, so I had to read a couple of books on how to build a guitar, and then I built one that sounded better in part because I knew it,” Gramann said. “And I decided to build more, and then I couldn’t stop. If you don’t want the house to fill up with guitars you have to sell them.”

In the 1960s, a product review magazine devoted to ecology, do-it-yourself skills and holistic living was launched—the “Whole Earth Catalog.” The Catalog gave the cottage industry of Appalachian luthiers an outlet for national advertising to an audience interested in old traditions and handmade tools. 

“There were Western North Carolina people that had advertisements in there,” Freed said. “And they would get letters from people all over the country that wanted instruments. So that particular style of banjo, the fretless mountain banjo, became really renowned to this area. And dulcimer building did as well.”

A wider market gave Appalachian luthiers an opportunity for unprecedented success, sometimes doing work for world-famous musicians, using skills they largely just taught themselves. “There was a guy named Albert Hash, who was from Southwest Virginia, … and he was machinist—he worked for a company making tools and things, and he came up with a machine that actually would cut out the shape of a fiddle, and he made all these machines to make building instruments easier,” Freed said.

Hash was noted for decorating his fiddles with recycled materials, using whatever he had readily available.

“He would name them all, and instead of using like abalone inlay, he used what he had accessible to himself—they might have like a plastic toothbrush and he would think that oh, well that’s a pretty color of plastic, and he would cut out little bits of toothbrush handles and use them as inlay, because it might have like a pretty red sheen about it,” Freed said.

Hash helped another self-taught luthier, Wayne Henderson, perfect his skills after Henderson started building guitars. 

“Wayne built his first guitar out of a dresser drawer, an old dresser drawer,” Freed said. “But it fell apart on him, because he didn’t understand all the ideas about the glue, and so he went to Albert Hash, and Albert helped him, and Wayne … and now builds instruments that sell for tens of thousands of dollars.”

Henderson was the subject of the book Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument, about making a guitar for rock star Eric Clapton.

In Burnsville, Ammen said he had the idea to start a luthier festival because this kind of homegrown art and craftsmanship seemed like a good fit in the town’s existing artistic community. 

“We’re bringing in people that hand-make musical instruments,” Ammen said. “Arts and crafts is a huge part of the Burnsville economy.”

For visitors, more information about the area—including lodging and directions—is available at the town’s website, townofburnsville.org.