Appalachian Dulcimer Traditions (13 page)

In the early 1990s, I set myself the task of trying to discover the identity of the mysterious person who had made hourglass-shaped dulcimers in Huntington, West Virginia, in the latter part of the 19th century. Happily, I was successful.

Most 19th-century dulcimers were made by mountain craftspeople who made just one or only a few. But the “Huntington maker” apparently ran a small dulcimer-making business, complete with printed labels, mail-order merchandise, and probably a sales and distribution network of itinerant peddlers. His activities spread knowledge and use of the dulcimer throughout West Virginia and western North Carolina, with some spillover into Ohio. The design of his instruments was widely adopted throughout the area. Yet by the time of the post–World War II folk revival, knowledge of this person's activities, his instruments, and even his name was entirely lost.

As noted in chapter 2, among the instruments that Allen Smith found during his dulcimer-hunting fieldwork were seven attractive dulcimers with the same pattern and design—all apparently made by the same person. They had hourglass-shaped bodies with heart-shaped sound holes—the type that most people picture when they think of a dulcimer today. Their bodies featured a long, slightly inward-turning curve between the head and the upper bout or bulge, as if the upper part of the body had been pulled like taffy. The heads were deeply fluted, and the pegs had squared-off rather than rounded flanges. On the back of the instruments, there were three little “feet” to facilitate playing on a table.

These dulcimers were painted in various colorful patterns. Several had black and red swirls or painted graining. A blue or green stripe and a series of stenciled numbers ran down the fretboard. On two of the instruments, flowers were painted in the strumming area.

Most significantly, the maker had no intention of remaining anonymous. Inside the lower right sound hole of several of them is a light-colored place where a label had once been affixed. Portions of a printed label remained in three of the instruments. On two of these, the words “Huntington, W. Va.” could be seen. And along the ragged top edge of one label there appeared four letters, “C P RD.” Were these part of the maker's name?

Two circumstances offered a time line. The state of West Virginia was created in 1863, so instruments with labels reading “W. Va.” could not have been made earlier than that. And, as noted in chapter 2, a Huntington dulcimer without a label entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1889, so the maker was active by then.

Studying the spacing of the letters “C P RD,” Smith surmised that the C was the first letter of the maker's first name, and he very shrewdly guessed that the last name was probably Prichard. In Springhill Cemetery in Huntington, Smith found a gravestone for a C. N. Prichard, who was born in 1839 and died in 1904. A Prichard family genealogy,
Descendants of William Prichard
, published in 1912, lists this person as Charles Napoleon Prichard. It includes the names of members of his family but provides no other information.

Was the person buried in Springhill Cemetery the Huntington dulcimer maker? Smith spent days searching old records of the City of Huntington, and of Cabell County in which it is located, but found nothing.

Some years later, in 1988, I found and bought a damaged, weather-beaten Huntington dulcimer in a Washington antique shop. It contained no label, but was accompanied by an allegedly notarized piece of paper dated 1973 saying that it had once belonged to Elias “Bad 'Lias” Hatfield, of the feuding Hatfields and McCoys. The document is an obvious forgery, but what about the tale itself?

The famous feud began in 1882. The Hatfields lived about 50 miles from Huntington, and it is known that Bad 'Lias played the fiddle. The place where the dulcimer was made and its approximate date probably could not have been known to a forger in 1973. Repaired and restored by Keith Young of Annandale, Virginia, the instrument now hangs in our living room and remains mute about where it was or what it saw and heard when it was young.

That's where the search for the Huntington maker stood in the summer of 1991 when I talked to Gerry Milnes, a folklorist associated with the Augusta Heritage Arts and Crafts Festival at Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia. He provided me with a real clue.

Milnes recalled that a mutual acquaintance named Jimmy Costa in Talcott, West Virginia, knew of a dulcimer with a label in it. Costa, a happy, ebullient person, is well known in West Virginia. He lives in a log cabin near the Greenbrier River, makes a modest income by doing carpentry, and devotes his life to gathering West Virginia historical information and artifacts.

I called Costa, who confirmed that he had heard of such an instrument somewhere. He would try to remember. After making one false start, he got on the right trail and discovered its whereabouts. The dulcimer was in the possession of a man who had borrowed it 16 years earlier from its owner and had never gotten around to returning it. It was arranged that the instrument would be returned via Costa's log cabin.

On Thanksgiving morning 1991, I entered the cabin. It was filled with historical artifacts, and I had to be careful where I stepped. I picked up the dulcimer and eagerly looked through the lower right sound hole. There I saw a label printed in several old typefaces, all italicized except for the words “Huntington, W. Va.” The paper had aged to a creamy brown, but not the tiniest chip was missing. The text, boxed inside two thin lines, read:

Figure 5.1 shows Jimmy Costa holding the dulcimer, and figure 5.2 shows a facsimile of the label.

Figure 5.1. Jimmy Costa holding the only Prichard dulcimer known that has a complete identifying label.

At last we knew the maker's name beyond doubt. But who was he? Was he the Charles N. Prichard who was buried in Huntington? Could anything be discovered about him?

By coincidence, a Huntington resident named David Mills contacted me at this time on another matter. I put him right to work. He called every Prichard in the Huntington area phone book. No luck. But he did turn up a front-page obituary in the 
Huntington Advertiser
 for September 12, 1904. Once again, we had been lucky; the Huntington Public Library's file of the 
Advertiser
, which is now defunct, extends back only as far as 1903.

 

This obituary states that Charles Napoleon Prichard was born in Bolt's Fork in eastern Kentucky, served in a Kentucky cavalry unit on the Union side in the Civil War, taught school in Kentucky after his military service, came to Huntington at an unspecified date, and in 1887 launched a successful advertising paper full of humorous sayings, called the
Cricket
. He and his little publication were clearly well liked. But the full-column story included nothing about dulcimers or about anything that even related to music or craftsmanship. Was I on a wild-goose chase?

Being a journalist and having the instincts of a journalist rather than a historian, I turned to the city's present-day newspaper, the
Huntington Herald Dispatch
. The editor of the paper's Style section was immensely interested. A reporter was assigned to the story, and the tale, complete with a picture of Costa holding the unique labeled dulcimer, was splashed across the top of the Style section in the paper's January 12, 1992, edition. The headline read “A Musical Mystery,” with the subhead “Man Searches for Lost Huntington Dulcimer Maker.” The story included my phone number, with my invitation to call collect with anything that might bear the slightest resemblance to relevant information.

It seemed as if the whole city of Huntington rose up to assist me. My phone rang for days. Callers gave me information on the whereabouts of a number of previously unknown old dulcimers in the Huntington area, including another Prichard dulcimer—this one with no label. But for the matter at hand, three of the calls were crucial.

The first came from a rare-book and manuscript dealer named C. E. “Tank” Turley, who told me that his current stock contained a photo album that had belonged to Charles N. Prichard's daughter Minnie. It provided no clue relating to dulcimers, but it did contain a picture of Charles. Turley sent me the photo of a kindly looking man (see figure 5.3). That Charles N. Prichard was indeed kind was soon to become evident from another caller's tale.

The next call, from a man named Norman E. Gill, was a breakthrough. Gill had been doing genealogical research on his own family, and one of the works he consulted was a volume entitled
1880 Census of West Virginia
, compiled by William A. Marsh. When he read the story in the
Herald Dispatch
, he checked the entries for Cabell County. Charles N. Prichard was listed, and the census taker had listed his occupation as “Manf. Music Int.” This is indisputably the man who is buried at Huntington; the listing of his family in the census coincides with the listing in the Prichard genealogy.

Figure 5.3. Charles N. Prichard. (Courtesy C. E. Turley)

Then, on Saturday, January 25, at 9:30 a.m., I received a call from Mrs. Golda Queen Frazier of Columbus, Ohio. Her son, who lives near Hun-tington, had seen the article and had sent her a copy. “I'm 86 years old,” she said, “and I am the granddaughter of John Wesley Prichard, Charles N. Prichard's brother. Yes, Charles made dulcimers. First he made them at Bolt's Fork, Kentucky, and then he made them in Huntington.”

In her phone call and in a follow-up letter, Mrs. Frazier told me that her mother had always wanted one of her Uncle Charles's dulcimers but had never been able to obtain one. When she was eight years old (this would be about 1913), Golda and her mother visited a lady named Mrs. Hicks, who owned a Prichard dulcimer. Golda's mother planned to buy it. Mrs. Hicks was poor, and Golda's mother was confident that she would sell. Mrs. Hicks played the instrument for her visitors, but she surprised and disappointed Golda's mother by refusing to sell it. Mrs. Hicks, it might be noted, was not the last poor person of Appalachia to refuse to sell a beloved dulcimer to a visitor who was prepared to pay whatever the owner would ask.