What happened?

Ron left a comment after my last post in which he said:
"I want to enjoy the dulcimer, not make it a project or an ordeal...No one told me that if I want to learn dulcimer, there were two ways to go---chording or melody/drone."

This got me to thinking...What has happened in the past several decades to so completely change the way beginners are introduced to the Appalachian dulcimer, to the point where many beginner dulcimer players aren't even told about the existence of traditional melody/drone style playing anymore? How did these changes happen, and what is the result? I fear this will take more than one post for me to ponder...

Let's start with some of the verified facts we do have about how the dulcimer used to be played long ago in Appalachia. One reliable source for this information is Jean Ritchie, who has written a great deal about her family, neighbors, and music players near her childhood home of Viper, Kentucky. Much of Jean's information comes from both before and after the 1920's when she was born.
We know that Jean's father Balis Ritchie (born 1869) used to play his dulcimer in melody/drone style, without playing full chords, and that according to Jean he only played in one tuning: CGG, which is the ionian tuning for the key of C. This is identical to our DAA tuning for the key of D, but tuned one whole step down on all strings, to play in the key of C instead. Many early church hymns and simple older folk tunes were played in the key of C in the old days.
Jean grew up in a time when people in the mountains were beginning to listen to the radio, and when she was a young lady she said that many of her friends scorned the 'old' music that their parents played in favor of more modern dance music and swing that was on the radio during the 30's and 40's. Jean experimented with different dulcimer tunings and with playing harmonies to compliment her singing. By the late 1940's the folk music boom was beginning, and Jean went to NYC with her dulcimer and her mountain repertoire and became a hit with the burgeoning folk scene there. Guitar playing folk musicians were everywhere, and they accompanied most songs with full sounding guitar chords.
Most of us have grown up deeply influenced by this folk boom era of the 1940's-60's, and we all grew up hearing our popular music framed in neat and resolved chord structures. Non-chordal 'archaic' drone based music was heard less and less. When it was heard, the usual reaction was that it was lacking something, or that it would sound more complete and thus better with a guitar chording backup.
This appetite for full chord structure spilled over into the dulcimer of course, and by the 1960's-1980's, a whole new generation of young urban dulcimer players were busy building dulcimers and exploring new frontiers of playing modern music on the dulcimer. This did a lot to popularize the dulcimer beyond even what Jean Ritchie might have imagined. But these talented young folk players overwhelmingly liked their music accompanied by standard Western chords, and chord playing/flatpicking guitar-like style was what most people could relate to- especially people who did not grow up hearing an older generation's traditional Appalachian music sounds. The addition of the 6 1/2 fret made this transition to chords even easier, as it enabled people to play in ionian mode while in mixolydian DAD tuning.

Thus it was that between about 1945 and today (over sixty years later) there has been a steady movement away from the more archaic interval and drone based music, and towards modern Western chord-based music. One could say that this is neither 'good' nor 'bad'....it just is.

Looking at dulcimer insruction books, one can clearly see this trend in action. Books written in the 1960's and 70's (starting with some of Jean Ritchie's instructional materials), will often be structured around the key of C, in ionian tuning (CGG or DAA) and playing noter style- or at least presenting the first chapters in learning/explaining the dulcimer in noter style, even explaining how to tune to the different modes. Some had their songs written out in standard music notation, with a single melody line. Later books begin to emphasize the key of D instead of C, the mixolydian tuning of DAD, and encourage the use of chords over the 'limited' use of a noter, and they often encourage the use of capos and the addition of added frets to change keys as opposed to re-tuning. If the book did contain a chapter about modes and other tunings, the reader would likely skip over that part as being too full of complex and unnecessary 'music theory'. Stuff for eggheads or music scholars. Chording the diatonically fretted dulcimer while playing the melody too was hard enough as it was without having to learn various new sets of chords for different tunings and keys!
The generation that learned dulcimer from these later books of course became the new teachers, and they began to teach DAD chording style to the legions of beginner players attending the new popular music camps, festivals, and workshops, and buying CD's, teaching DVD's and more books.

The end result of all this is that the beginner dulcimer player of today is typically presented with learning material that focuses heavily on chording/flatpicking style of playing, in the key of D and tuned DAD. The occasional switch to DAA or the idea of tuning to another key or mode is now seen by beginners as being scary and difficult- something to be avoided if at all possible.
Instead of learning only a simple melody line and letting the drones flesh out the sound, students must now keep giant binders full of tabbed chords in front of them at all times. The older beginner especially, with limited musical experience, may find the many chord fingerings to be daunting and complex and he/she winds up having to juggle flat picking on various strings, stretching fingers into difficult-to-reach chord formations that change quickly, and keeping track of the tabbed chord fingering numbers on the page...all at the same time. Yikes!More about simple playing in my next post.