Free Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions by Ralph Lee Smith

was added to this tale in 1992, when I visited Ken Kurtz, a college classmate who lives in Lexington, Kentucky, in connection with my search for information on “Uncle Ed” Thomas, the old-time Kentucky dulcimer maker who is discussed in chapter 6. At the Lexington Public Library, he showed me an old photograph of a dulcimer player that appears on page 243 of a book entitled Our Kentucky: A Study of the Bluegrass State , edited by James C. Klotter. The caption read, “The dulcimer is a mainstay of folk music.”
    I made a copy of the photo without really looking at it, but when I examined it later, I gasped. The dulcimer on the player’s lap appears to be a virtual duplicate of the one found by Wiseman. It may even be the identical instrument!
    A credit line that accompanies the photo in Our Kentucky states that it was provided by the Kentucky Historical Society. I called the society, where a records check found that the man in the picture was named F. M. Waits, that the picture was taken in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1929, and that it is one of a number of photos taken by a now-defunct photo studio that found their way into the society’s collection. That is all that anyone knows.

    Figure 3.7. “Scheitholt on a soundbox.” (Gary Putnam)
SCHEITHOLTS-IN-BOXES
    Before we leave the world of old scheitholts and early dulcimers, we can look at a type of instrument that could be called a “scheitholt-in-a-box,” whose origins probably predate 1850. In my “Dulcimer Tales and Traditions” column in the July–September 1993 issue of Dulcimer Players News , I described the only three specimens that were then known. One was illustrated in the “Queries” column of Antiques magazine in January 1932 and reproduced on page 32 of Smith’s Catalogue . Figure 3.8 shows a second instrument found and purchased by Randolph M. Case of Lawrenceville, Georgia. The third one was found and purchased by Don Koerber of Warren, Michigan.
    All three instruments have a hinged lid. Opening the lid reveals a raised portion, shaped like a long right triangle with head and tuning pins at the truncated apex, which is set into the rectangular top surface of the box.
    The First One Discovered
    The photo in the January 1932 issue of Antiques was submitted by a reader identified only as “W. L. W.” The instrument has six strings, two of which pass over the frets. The top and the inside of the lid are stencil-painted with charming designs, including sailboats and five rocking horses, one of which appears beneath the strumming area. In publishing the picture, the magazine ventured that “the character of the stenciling points to a date somewhere in the first quarter of the 1800s.”

    Figure 3.8. Scheitholt in a box. (Randolph M. Case)
    Mr. R. P. Hummel, the authority to whom Antiques submitted the query, replied with impressive accuracy that the instrument “appears to be an elaboration of the primitive zither which was popular among the Pennsylvania Germans in the 18th century, and of which several are preserved in the Mercer Museum of Doylestown, Pennsylvania.”
    Two More Are Found
    When I attended the Great Black Swamp Dulcimer Festival as an instructor in the spring of 1983, Don Koerber told me that he had acquired a scheitholt-in-a-box (good views of the closed box and of the stenciling on the top of the instrument appear on pages 45 and 46 of my book The Story of the Dulcimer ).
    Koerber’s instrument has a finely shaped, grain-painted box and lid, and it stands on small feet. The name “E. BECKWITH” is stenciled on the front of the lid. There is stenciled ornamentation on the top and the inside of the lid, including two lions, an eagle, and the words “Columbian Improved Harp.” As with the instrument illustrated in Antiques , there are six strings, two of which pass over the frets. Letters corresponding to notes of the musical scale are stenciled in