Melodic Journey Ahead

Experience the enchanting melody, 'Winding Road' on piano and dulcimer. Immerse yourself in tranquility.

Thank you. AI, for this title and description. Don't know how AI decided the song was "enchanting" and "tranquil," because I never told it anything. But heh.

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August 18, 2024

This is my dulcimer, and here is a song I wrote when I was 23 years old. I went to Fiverr and paid someone to play it on a piano for me so I could hear it on a more sophisticated instrument, just as a treat to myself. I haven't played dulcimer in forty years, so the music sounds better coming from somebody else.

But I personally changed the trajectory of the dulcimer community long ago, and I would like to brag about that and tell the story. I introduced a new fingerpicking playing method and popularized the now-standard tuning when everyone else was tuning it another way. That was me.

My original version on dulcimer plays afterward. It is a rustic handmade three-stringed instrument you normally associate with old-timey mountain folk music. It’s what Joni Mitchell played on her "Blue" album. The dulcimer sat in my closet for 40 years while I raised kids and then forgot about it. It moved to other closets in several different homes in several different states with the other unused things I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of. I finally pulled it out on June 4th this year (2024), so I’ve been playing again for nine-ish weeks, after forty years. It will still be a few weeks before I can play without mistakes, so you’re getting raw insight into things in this early moment.

Sorry for the quality of the video imagery as well. The software was bollocks, and I couldn't fix it no matter what I did. I opted for, "Life is too short."

If you knew me from 1977 to 1984, you heard me play this song because I made everyone listen to me play the dulcimer. Everyone. I was very proud of myself. This one is probably the second or third song I wrote – it was a very early one. I just took to composing right away and I never played a song on that dulcimer that I didn’t write. I wrote songs for seven years.

I feel like the story behind it is kind of interesting. I have no musical background, no music lessons, no exposure to musical theory, no training. I dated a couple of musicians, is all. I begged for piano lessons from the time I was very small, but my mother told me in a case of shocking false equivalency that I’d just give it up like my older brother gave up accordion lessons (as would you, and as would anyone else, so…?). So, no. She wasn’t going to throw her money away. I didn’t need piano lessons. So that’s why. Accordions. But I was determined, so when I got the dulcimer, I just figured it out.

In 1977 I worked for the Renaissance festival in Bristol, Wisconsin, about 45 minutes north of Chicago. I wandered into the dulcimer shop one day. I wasn’t sure why I suddenly required a dulcimer, but I apparently did, so I tested the sound on every single instrument in the shop, not knowing what I was looking for but knowing I’d recognize it when I heard it. I described choosing an instrument as “selecting a spouse.” Testing was the most important step in the process, and I understood this without knowing “why.” It took me hours and several visits to the shop before I finally found one and married it.

But it was the end of the season, and everyone was moving on, so I didn’t have an opportunity to get the instrument figured out with coaching from the musicians who performed at the festival. I went home and messed everything up. I would learn this when I returned the following year with a repertoire of new songs, including this one.

Standard dulcimer tuning in 1977 was “Ionian,” where you tune those three strings to D-a-A, with “A” being the bass string, farthest away from you. You played the instrument with a pick and got a twangy, droning sound. The dulcimer shops tuned all their instruments to Ionian. You had to find out about Mixolydian tuning some other way.

I probably popped the bass string and replaced it with another string, then tuned it to the wrong key. I don’t know what I did, but I ended up with Mixolydian tuning, which is D-a-D. This happened right away, within just a couple of days (I was learning how much tension a guitar string could take – not that much), so I never knew the difference. I kept at it, la-la-la. It turns out that you can play chords only in Mixolydian, not Ionian, so my “mistake” was sprinkled with fairy dust.

I didn’t like playing with a pick – it’s one degree of separation from the music – so I taught myself to finger pick. It felt more natural to me. I found notes and chords without knowing which ones they were (I still don’t) and pieced them together.

I got a mentor when I showed up at the festival in 1978, a musician named Matthew Peregrine, who played dulcimer the traditional way at a very high level, like Joni Mitchell. He tore it up. I showed Matthew what I had done, and he was like, “What??” That is when I learned what I had done with the tuning of the instrument.

The festival was filled with musicians, and he kept making me play for them, pulling them aside to listen to me. I would run to him first whenever I wrote a new song. He was my cheerleader for several years, and he used to brag about me, which I loved.

One year he moved on, and then I never saw him again. I didn’t feel like playing anymore without him, so I put the dulcimer away. He died of AIDS in 1992 I just recently learned. He was gay, and I had been afraid all these years to google him because I liked picturing him alive, so I didn’t want to know. But now I do, and it hit me hard.

In 1979 a different dulcimer maker, Roderick, joined the show. His shop was always filled with the “dulcimer crowd,” people with dulcimers who just wanted to hang out with other dulcimer players. They were always there. He asked me to come by and give demonstrations to them and to his customers, which I frequently did. I played for all of them a couple of times a day during the festival for seven years.

I’m a tiny part of music history, y’all, and I have legitimate bragging rights. In 1981 Roderick told me that the dulcimer community is small and tightly knit, and that my Mixolydian tuning and picking methods had spread throughout that community and were now becoming more prevalent, and perhaps even becoming the standard. He told me that I did that. I had played for Roderick’s local dulcimer customers and Matthew’s many musicians (most of whom traveled the country and some of whom played dulcimer), and they were re-tuning their instruments to Mixolydian and teaching themselves my technique. Some of them came back to show me how they were doing over the years. I was very thrilled by that. I’m still very proud.

Back then, I think I was the only person playing “classical dulcimer” and composing neoclassical music for a three-stringed instrument. That’s the sort of twisted thing I do: disregard precedent. I like the odd road. There are probably others now, but in the late seventies, early eighties I was a novelty, so the musicians and dulcimer players at the festival found me interesting and noteworthy. It was kind of trippy when they referred to ME as a “musician.”

More mindboggling to me is that I had an impact on dulcimer music, and it was lasting. Wow. I went to YouTube and found people who are still playing with my technique.

I bought a dulcimer instruction book after I pulled my dulcimer out of the closet, because the instrument didn’t feel like it was an extension of me anymore and I wasn’t connecting to it. I thought maybe a book and someone else’s songs would prime the pump and get me going again. I never used it though. The dulcimer coughed and cleared its throat and came alive again on its own.

In the book’s introduction it refers to Mixolydian as being “traditional” tuning. It is not. Ionian is the traditional tuning. Mixolydian only became the more common tuning in about 1980, according to Roderick, who told me I did that.

I can also play a hair comb covered with plastic wrap, so I am a dual-instrumentalist. I performed John Phillip Souza’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” on two occasions at the Renaissance festival on a Sunday morning, in two different years to keep it fresh, when everyone camping out was still asleep. I marched around the festival grounds playing Stars and Stripes on comb at top volume, all the way to the end, including trills. Good morning.

I’m done bragging now.

Roderick made the dulcimer in the picture. He made a mistake when he was carving the fretboard and drilled those two long slits to begin to hollow it out, turned the strip of wood over, then got distracted and began cutting new slits on the other side not realizing he’d already made his cuts. When he hollowed out the fretboard those slits went straight through. They weren’t supposed to, so he was trying to figure out what to do with the instrument. Destroying it was one of his options.

Roderick kept working on the dulcimer, and he used the bad fretboard just to see what would happen. He was still trying to figure out what he wanted to do, but he’d strung it, so I tested it just out of curiosity. Oh my God. This was my dulcimer. I had to divorce my current dulcimer so I could marry this one. It was perfect, and no others need apply. The two slit holes made it a little louder and gave it a deeper resonance, which is important when you finger pick because the sound is so soft (“flickering candles,” was how Roderick described it). When he finished making the dulcimer, I took possession of it immediately. It was another mistake sprinkled with fairy dust.

Roderick died in 2018, so the dulcimer is a treasure.

When I pulled the dulcimer out of the closet in June, I could only remember three songs, and they were the songs I’d written earliest, so I’d retained muscle memory from having played them the longest. The rest of the songs are completely gone, and I got better over the years, so I unfortunately lost some pretty good ones. I need to begin all over again.

I was going to call this one “Pirouettes on a Winding Road” because that’s what I imagine when I play it. But I can’t spell “pirouettes” without getting yelled at by Spell Check, and I have been a FREAKING WRITER for decades so I should know how to spell without assistance, one might presume. But no. I concluded that others might also be afflicted with spelling deficiencies and that no one would find my song in a search engine were it ever to be published, unless I removed that word.

It is now just “Winding Road.” People can spell that. I can too. It might even display in search results alongside the Beatles, which improves my status by association and might even grab me some unwarranted clicks.

It should be at a slightly faster tempo and more joyful, but I used up all my revisions with the Fiverr person, so this is what we get. When I get better at this, I’ll play it the way I want it to sound. I just can’t do that yet. It takes time.

Nell Gavin