Music and Family

My father waxing eloquent about his musical experiences.

Where did you hear music?

"You're talking about a child, early or later or what? We would go to church on Sunday and when I was young we did Latin mass so it was sung. That was one thing. My mother- grandma- she had several record albums, I'm talking really young, she had uh, mainly sacred music. The other thing was, I don't know if you've heard of Mitch Miller? It was this sing along thing you would do on TV. Mitch Miller sings or something like that. My uncle-- Uncle Pete-- he would come over and play guitar and we would sing. We lived in Arlington Virginia we used to go to the folk music festival. We heard people like Doc Watson, we heard all kinds of music. We would also go to, uh, Cellar Door had an outdoor concert series. We would listen to, uh, it was either Friday or Saturday night, we would listen to people like Roberta Flack. We would go, uh, we actually had a group we started, as a family, and we would play music for church. It was a folk mass. I played tenor banjo and Joe and Chris played guitar and Steve played the mandolin. "

What are the instruments you played?

"Oh-- I mainly played tenor banjo and five string banjo. Um, not much else. "

What were your singing experiences? I know you were in a barbershop quartet for a while.

"That was when I was older, in my twenties. I also in high school was in chorus, in Arlington but not here, not in high school. I sang some in musicals. I mainly did plays. I also did, when we, uh, when grandma and I made musical instruments we would travel and play all over the place. Like Galax and Smithfield, Tennessee."

Were you ever exposed to any music of other cultures?

"Yes. Um, when we went to those Smithsonian folk music festivals, they would have people from all different areas. From Africa, there were all kinds of different folk music from around the world. Mainly this country, but other cultures as well."

Can you list some of your favorite musical artists?

"Probably Eugene Hutz, John McCutcheon, Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, Greg Brown and Allison Krauss, Gene Ritchie, uh, Bob Dylan and the Band, The Beatles, (Woody Guthrie! my mother shouts from the background)  "

Can you tell me about the business you and grandma had making instruments?

"We made dulcimers mainly. Almost exclusively. Grandma made bread dough flower arrangements and saved enough money to buy a kit. And then we took it to a local place and had them duplicate the kit ten times and then we made dulcimers from those ten. All we had to do was glue them together. After that we decided to make our own, we made 211 dulcimers total. I made four or five banjos. Basically we talked to other makers, but we mainly did it our own way because we used the tools we had. Grandma used to make the pegs. We both had our different jobs. She did most of the carving and made the pegs. She made them on a belt sander. We sold them at folk festivals. The odd thing was that we made the dulcimers and sold them for 120-150 dollars, bu people wouldn't just buy them on the spot. They'd take your brochures and think about it. What we did figured a way of making whistles from the extra wood and sold them for $2 a piece and we'd make our gas money. Otherwise we'd go to a show and get a single order and it could get pretty lean. That's how we started and we did okay. We figured out how much money we were making and it wasn't very much. We ended up going into other things. "