The Virginia Dulcimer:
200 Years of Bowing, Strumming, & Picking
Through March 2011 in the DuPont Gallery
A gentle icon of mountain music, the dulcimer has made a long journey from the poorer classes of 17th century Europe to the laps of modern American folk revival musicians. In Virginia the dulcimer became American both in design and repertoire, and it was played by a range of musicians from hymn singers to ballad singers to dance bands. The Virginia Dulcimer: 200 Years of Strumming, Bowing, & Picking explores the instrument’s varied role in the folk music and traditional crafts of the state.
The Virginia Dulcimer showcases over 50 dulcimers from the 1700s to today. Along with the instruments themselves, the exhibition is loaded with history, vintage photographs, and video clips illustrating ways of playing the instrument, including old-style bowing. Among the instruments on display is John Scales’ 1832 Floyd County dulcimer, the oldest signed-and-dated dulcimer known in the United States.
German settlers first brought the dulcimer down Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the 1700s. Their instruments were straight-sided and had as many as a dozen strings. By the 1830s a truly American dulcimer with curved sides and a prominent fretboard had developed in the Commonwealth. The dulcimer was the second most common instrument (behind the fiddle) in Virginia’s southern Blue Ridge from the American Revolution to the mid-1800s. Use of the banjo and fiddle surged far ahead in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but the dulcimer remained popular as a result of national revivals of handcrafts and folk music through the 1900s.
The Virginia Dulcimer: 200 Years of Bowing, Strumming, and Picking runs through March 2011 at Ferrum College. To complement the exhibition, Ferrum’s annual Blue Ridge Folklife Festival (October 23, 2010) will feature special dulcimer workshops, and a dulcimer-building weekend is being planned for the winter.
By Women’s Hands
Photographs from the BRI’s Earl Palmer Collection
Through March 2011 in the King Gallery
Earl Palmer (1905-1996) called himself the “Blue Ridge Mountains’ Roamin’ Cameraman.” It was a fitting title. Throughout his life Palmer watched Appalachia modernize, and in response he sought out scenes of a disappearing rural lifestyle. His camera was his pulpit for praising the old ways. Not surprisingly Palmer created many pictures of women doing traditional “women’s work.” Running through March 2011, By Women’s Hands presents one artist’s vision of mountain folkways now almost lost to history.
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