When did half-width frets vanish? (was: Full-width frets)

[Ken Bloom]

I think it's more a simple matter of people wanting to play familiar sounding music on their instrument. Builders and players are pretty pragmatic. Fretwire is easier to do than staples, at least for me. Once you have frets going all the way across it was only a matter of time before fretting more than one string became common. It's not good to overthink this stuff. People do what people do. Then academicians come along and try to figure out a theory for the facts to fit into.

Ken Bloom
http://www.boweddulcimer.com

[DonM]

I think Ken is right. You'll see in L A Smith's book that there were occasional makers that experimented with different fretting, most notably John Jacob Niles, but for purposes of modern dulcimers and their players, I think Homer Ledford and Richard Farina really influenced modern instruments. Homer did put in a full width fourth fret at least once, I would guess so he could get both dominant and subdominant chords while noting. With unfretted drones, you can either have one or the other, but not both. But once fret wire was available, and most players wanting to play like Richard, it seems obvious that it's hard to use fret wire other than all the way across the fret board, which resulted in chordable instruments. The old pre-revival makers didn't have access to fret wire generally speaking, and didn't have any real need for it as it was not traditional.

[razyn]

In 1964 Homer was making his own (mostly 2/3 width) staples out of broom wire for his dulcimer frets, and using commercial fretwire for banjos and other instruments. I think Edd Presnell switched to fretwire on dulcimers before Homer did (among the more productive makers who had roots in the tradition). It's more of a dusty recollection than something I can document. They both were exhibitors in the juried craft fairs of the Southern Highland Craftsmen's Guild, for instance.

[Pinetop]

Did a Google images search for Jean Ritchie dulcimer... Dates for most pictures were not readily available, but it looks to me like she was playing a model with full-width frets by the early 1950s. My hunch is that when her husband George Pickow started making her dulcimers he found it easier to use fret wire than the "staple" style that Jethro Amburgey had used on Jean's earlier instrument. Someone else may very well have used full frets earlier, but I'd spect that pix of Jean gave the idea that that's how dulcimers were s'posta be made...

[strumelia]

Pinetop, I've not seen photos of Jean in the early or even mid 1950's playing full width fret dulcimers. Can you point some out?
The only 1950's photos of Jean I ever see show her playing staple fret diatonic dulcimers, like these photos for example:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2sqiPXZs450/TxyyLbhChMI/AAAAAAAAAJc/aiuhimovVJ0/s320/Jean-Ritchie-242x300.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/etsuarchives/4368728890/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8863156@N08/3185234892/in/set-72157624579023874/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8863156@N08/6832596914/in/photostream

[Shape note singer]

Can't date those particular photos, but Jean Ritchie's dulcimer book , with similar photo on the cover, was published in 1967...

[Shape note singer]

The cover of her later book titled "Dulcimer People" published in 1975,
shows Jean Ritchie with Dulcimers arrayed around her,
most of which appear to have frets all the way across....

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-media ... F8&index=0

[pristine2]

The cover of her later book titled "Dulcimer People" published in 1975,
shows Jean Ritchie with Dulcimers arrayed around her,
most of which appear to have frets all the way across....

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-media ... F8&index=0

Certainly by 1975, the overwhelming majority of mountain dulcimers in use had full-width frets. My guess is that fewer than 10% of them did 20 years previously.

This thread, along with this one viewtopic.php?f=2&t=23270&hilit=fret+saw+all+the+way+across , seem to have produced a fairly detailed consensus on the issue.

I still wish I knew more about what individual builders in the revival period were thinking. Part of me is tempted to write Jean herself, but she's been in poor health and I'm reluctant to intrude, even with written questions.

Richard

[Ken Bloom]

I became aware of the dulcimer in the 60's and a good friend of mine, Robbie Long got into building dulcimers at that time. This was in California. All the dulcimers I saw had full width frets and, as far as I know, Robbie only made them with full width frets. I had seen pictures but I never actually saw a dulcimer with half frets until I started doing the Dulcimer Workshop at Appalacian State back in the 90's and was privileged to examine many of Ralph Lee Smith's collection. This is an anecdotal snapshot of a Northern California dulcimer scene so you can take it for what it's worth. The music people were playing was not traditional music. It was reggae and songs that people had written. We were certainly aware of the tradition but didn't do very much of it. The music that was played on the dulcimer in the area where I lived was much more influencedf by pop music and R&R than anything from the North Carolina mountains.

[strumelia]

With all due respect to Pinetop, I was just trying to clarify that Jean Ritchie was not regularly playing full width fret dulcimers in the early 1950's, thus it was not photos of her from the 1950's that caused others to start making full width dulcimers. By the mid and late 60's on the east and west coasts, young folk and rock playing innovators were making and playing full width mtn dulcimers and playing all kinds of music on them. It was a groovy new instrument with mountain connections! People like Dylan, JBaez, the Farinas, Pete S. and dozens of other young influential artists were playing new takes on old ballads and folks songs along with their own new music. Though some of them had doubtless seen or heard of JJNiles and his own dulcimer hybrid instruments and his somewhat 'unique' ballad singing style, more likely it was Jean who was their source, who brought the dulcimer from obscurity in Kentucky and injected it directly into the heart of the 1950's folk music scene in NYC. Farina never saw a dulcimer until he was captivated by Jean playing one at a Greenwich Village party, and he asked her all about it and got one of his own shortly after. Richard's first dulcimer had diatonic staple frets I believe? He had a 6.5 added later, while preparing for a concert.

[pristine2]

I became aware of the dulcimer in the 60's and a good friend of mine, Robbie Long got into building dulcimers at that time. This was in California. All the dulcimers I saw had full width frets and, as far as I know, Robbie only made them with full width frets.

Ken's remarks suggest another feature of the progression of full-width frets -- a geographic one.

It seems reasonable to make the conjecture that in places like the West Coast and New England in the mid 1960s, to where the instrument was imported, dulcimers had full-width frets from the get-go, while half-width staples persisted for a while longer in the dulcimer heartland, where older makers were transitioning to full-width frets, and newer makers starting out with them. It also seems that at least some North Carolina builders had a full-width-fret tradition, and all of them started abandoning stapled frets as early as the late 1950s, whereas this did not happen in Kentucky for another few years, perhaps because of the strength of the tradition revolving around Jethro Amburgey, Jess Patterson and the settlement schools. I've never seen an Amburgey (who died in 1971) with full-width frets. I have two Pattersons; the one dated 1962 has half-width stapled frets, and the one dated 1968 has full-width stapled frets. Other than that one, every Kentucky dulcimer I've seen from the mid-1960s or earlier had half-width frets. In Tennessee, too, there seems to have been both full-width and half-width traditions, with the latter dominating before disappearing quickly sometime in the mid-1960s. I have no idea what was going on in Arkansas before Lynn McSpadden started building there.

There's no question that Jean was the first and most important evangelist of the instrument in New York, and that the first Kentucky hourglasses she brought there had half-width frets, as did the first instruments she built there. But she appears to have decided pretty early on to build (and have built) full-width-fret dulcimers to market in New York.

[strumelia]

I imagine Jean's production of dulcimers included full width frets by the mid to late 60's, but I don't know the exact date of her production transition and whether it was a total switch from staple frets. She did play both full width and staple frets from the mid 60's on I'm guessing. She eventually had quite a few dulcimers, from various sources.

--One very minor note from a New Yorker- Richard, New York state is not generally considered part of New England, but is rather in 'the northeast'. http://www.ne-tc.com/www/ ...And NY is important enough to early dulcimer revival history to be included.