One day some years ago, the musician Becky Cleland asked her husband Ben Seymour to find her a plucked psaltery, a many-stringed zither of medieval origins that she thought would be a good addition to the repertoire she and Seymour perform as the traditional-music duo Gingerthistle. Seymour duly found a supplier, but wasn’t happy with the instrument that emerged from the kit he’d received. “I noticed the quality of the woods was very poor, and the pattern itself lacked finesse,” he says. “I decided I could do better from scratch.”
He could, indeed, and while an order for a custom-made psaltery may only appear occasionally now, Seymour’s handcrafted dulcimers — made of domestic woods like poplar and more exotic ones, including a type of African rosewood — are prized by performers of both traditional mountain music and more adventurous forms. They’re regularly played by nationally known artists of the genre, such as Steve Eulberg and Phyllis Gaskins.
Each instrument can take up to 50 hours to produce, and can cost anywhere from several hundred dollars to more than a thousand for a custom instrument. Almost all of Seymour’s orders come to him through his website. “I build only to a client’s specifications, and always on commission,” he notes.
The four-stringed lap dulcimer is one of the simplest instruments to learn to play, but its history is a bit more difficult to trace. It’s a descendent of various forms of zithers common in Europe for centuries, but there’s no direct link between those instruments and the long, slender one that appeared in the Southern Appalachians soon after Scots and Irish immigrants began arriving in the early decades of the 18th century.
No such instrument was known in either Scotland or Ireland, where the fiddle was more common. It’s possible that a lack of proper materials and leisure to build the more complex fiddle led to a more quickly fashioned and easily learned instrument. There are no known examples of dulcimers surviving from before 1880, and no recording of one until the 1930s. The folk revival of the ’60s, and especially the music of the Kentucky-born folksinger Jean Ritchie, whose performances prominently featured the dulcimer, led to a renaissance.
Seymour, who moved to Tryon’s Green Creek area with Cleland nearly a quarter century ago from Cleland’s native Knoxville, at first only built dulcimers for his own use. “I was a player and wanted more than one,” he says, “so I figured this was the easiest way to feed my habit. And I could make them with any features I desired to fit my style of playing.” While Cleland’s family had the stronger musical tradition, Seymour’s father was a minister, with church-singing a strong element of his childhood. “And there was always a hummed tune, or my Dad’s whistling,” he says.
As his business and its client list grew, Seymour expanded his dulcimer crafting by becoming one of just a handful of Southeastern luthiers who construct dulcimers in the style known as Galax. Rather than the tear-shaped body of a standard dulcimer, the Galax is lozenge-shaped, and is tuned differently than its more common brethren.
“Galaxes were first made in southwestern Virginia by luthiers in two families there, but they all died out,” he explains.
Unlike the standard dulcimer, meant for solo performances in quieter settings, a Galax dulcimer can hold its own in a band. “The Galax’s strings are tuned in unison, usually to Middle C or sometimes to D above Middle C,” he notes, “so it can be heard in a group of other instruments.” The Galax’s two strings closest to the player are plucked with a flat wooden “noter” to produce the melody, while the other two strings are strummed for the underlying drone.
“But because of the tuning, you can play in two keys without retuning in between,” Seymour adds.
He’s also made the kind of folkloric European stringed instruments ancestral to the zither and dulcimer: the Swedish hummel, the German scheitholt, the Norwegian langeleik, the French épinette des Vosges. And it doesn’t stop there: “I’ve built a bowed psaltery, a Paraguayan harp, Irish bouzoukis, and guitars,” he says.
“Guitars are probably the most difficult, especially if you’re making high-quality ones.” But that’s the only kind Seymour allows himself to make.
For more information on luthier Ben Seymour visit Kudzupatch.net.