America the Melting Pot has been infused over time with drums and strings from all over the globe – please never forget that the banjo comes from Africa – but the mountain dulcimer is a truly American instrument, born in the Scots-Irish Appalachian communities. Joellen Lapidus is Dulcimer Royalty – a pioneer of contemporary California mountain dulcimer playing and building. She’s taught in-person and virtually at dulcimer festivals and workshops across the country, from beginner level to upper-intermediate Slap/Chop Technique and Jazz Rhythms. Joellen spoke with me here about her contributions to FolkWorks, and to the legacy of dulcimer.

me: I had a lot of fun reading all the things you wrote at FolkWorks.

JL: Dulcimer Jazz.

me: Yes! Was there some sort of a through-line in the people that you chose to interview?

JL: Generations. I like to look at it as generations of dulcimer players. Jean Ritchie in Appalachia—that’s the first generation. That’s where the dulcimer was invented. It has predecessors in Europe, but it’s its own instrument. I love that it used to be made of simple woods and staples…the frets weren’t fancy metal like we have today, and they didn’t go all the way across. You can see that the whole idea was to play a melody and have the drones harmonize with it. Simple and beautiful.

me: Jean Ritchie is the first generation.

JL: So Jean Ritchie comes up to New York in the 60s, to study social work, and she comes up during the folk revival in Greenwich Village. Of course, Alan Lomax finds her and decides to record her, and all of a sudden she has this music career. She tours all over the country, especially colleges. So the second generation is the people who heard Jean Ritchie and then played the dulcimer. Richard Fariña is that generation. Richard Fariña, in his short life, developed a whole different style of playing the dulcimer because of his Irish-Cuban background in New York, exposed to all kinds of music. He’s putting these heavy rhythms, writing contemporary protest songs, not folk songs about something that happened 40-50 years ago. He has this band with percussion, electric guitar, harmonies—I got to hear him at Newport Music Festival in ’65 right before he died. I’ve told this story so many times it’s hard to express it, but it just woke something up in me, and I have followed that beacon my whole life.

There’s a really funny story. One of the album covers has Richard holding the dulcimer. All of us west-coasters who wanted to build dulcimers looked at that album cover, saw this giant dulcimer, and we started building larger dulcimers. Years later, many of us got to see that dulcimer, and it’s tiny.

All of us who kind of inherited from Richard Fariña, and Jean, we’re the third generation. That’s my generation. The third generation just took off from what Richard Fariña did. Added the six-plus fret…

me: Janita Baker moved her strings around…that’s an interesting story.

JL: And Janita was a banjo player, and put all that banjo stuff and guitar stuff on the dulcimer, and created a whole new way of playing. Robert Force & Al D’Ossche started building a dulcimer that was kind of an oval shape, and they played it standing up like it was a guitar. They were fabulous instruments. There’s a shape that’s completely different. There’s a traditional dulcimer called a Galax dulcimer that has that shape, but it’s much thicker.

me: That, I think, was the first dulcimer I ever came into contact with. That’s what I thought they looked like.

JL: The Galax style of playing – I’m sure there are variations of it – are that all the strings are the same note…which is one of the tunings we all play in. Sometimes it’s called the bagpipe tuning. When you go to a festival in Kentucky,  you meet all these people who grew up in that tradition. It’s a whole different experience. Someone like myself who grew up in New York City, then the West Coast, and being a hippie, the influence of world music – I was really into Indian music – the dulcimer has really exploded in terms of what you can do on it. Some people even put all the frets so it’s chromatic. Okay!

I do have a little bit of resistance with this thing called a Seagull – have you seen them? They call themselves a dulcimer, but they’re fretted like a major scale, so they don’t have the sixth fret. They don’t have the mixolydian 7^th note. I’m fine; people can do anything they want…

The dulcimer, I like to say, is an untamed instrument. There’s no rules.

me: I noticed that many of the people you interviewed were even newer generations, and some of the playing is just wild. Who’s that…

JL: Aaron? Aaron O’Rourke?

me: Yeah, that one.

JL: Nobody can play like him. Nobody. There’s some new guys…when the shutdown happened, the pandemic, these five musicians, mostly from Middle America to the East Coast, created a festival called the Quarantune Festival. I think I started participating in the fourth one. You have 75 teachers, and dulcimer players from all over the world – Australia, the British Isles, Japan – you only get 10 or 12 minutes, but you sit there and you hear everything that’s going on with the dulcimer in the world. It’s only $25 for the whole four concerts. Four days: Thursday, Friday, two on Sunday. That’s how many people there are teaching at this festival.

me: I really want to hear how dulcimer compares around the world.

JL: Dulcimer festivals are funny, because they usually pair the hammer dulcimer with the mountain dulcimer. And the two instruments have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It makes for a good amount of people coming to your festival. We all kind of hopefully love each other; I love them. We love each other. But I’ve never been able to get the hang of the hammer dulcimer.

me: I’m still thinking about the younger people that you interviewed, and the dulcimer map I’m building in my mind. The roots are in Appalachia; anything that blossoms in New York has a special and wonderful flavor. I like that.

JL: Well, a lot of these new young people are not coming out of the big cities. They’re actually coming out of the middle states. Now they’ve been exposed because of the internet, and Spotify and YouTube. Everybody’s now, if they want to be, exposed to everything. A lot of these young innovators are just fabulous. Grant Olson, who’s just amazing, and this guy named Lil Rev – he’s in his 20s, but just amazing. Erin Mae, she’s just terrific. You know, when Joni Mitchell had her 50^th anniversary of the Blue album, because there’s those four dulcimer songs, I got a lot of attention. I got a lot of interviews – in England; the Rolling Stone – it was wild. She doesn’t really play dulcimer anymore. It was just a moment in time. That’s another generation of dulcimer players. A lot of people come to me and just want to learn the Joni Mitchell songs.

(me) Like Harry Styles…Here’s that story from Joellen’s own Facebook page:

When Harry Styles came to my home to purchase a dulcimer, I had no idea that he was a big star. Here were these two really nice guys who loved Joni’s music. We jammed on several dulcimers I had for sale and he picked the one with the most heart in it: the Crying Seahorse Dulcimer. I had no idea who he was until the dulcimer player Kevin Roth called me up one day and said “How do you know Harry Styles?” Then I got calls to do interviews from both Rolling Stone and The Guardian. It just made me laugh. I was so happy I had no idea who he was because it allowed us to have a very pure musical moment together.

– Joellen Lapidus

Joellen Lapidus classes at Quarantunes 10, June 2023