Three Strings: Past, Present, and Future

Ayla Samli | Longreads | May 14, 2024 | 4,420 words (16 minutes)

Sometimes the past comes up in unexpected ways, like roots turning up the sidewalk, refusing to stay flat beneath the concrete. The roots insinuate themselves into the present, compelling you to walk carefully and mindfully; you must step through them to move forward.

A Latinate root had gotten under my feet. I studied Latin from middle school through college, and sometimes its familiar yet surprising tendrils show up on my path. A new acquaintance came into my life, the first person I had ever met with a cognate name, Dulce. A local Italian bakery of the same root, Dolci, opened near my neighborhood. Then an instrument filled my ears with memories and hope for belonging: the mountain dulcimer. The open vowel topped off with the “l” rolls around in the mouth like a light, creamy confection. Sweetness is at the center of these delectable words.

The mountain dulcimer began to call to me when my family and I were at a local folk festival. The air that day was flooded with new and comforting scents—and sounds. We walked from stage to stage, passing food trucks with acrid-sweet smells of North Carolina barbeque and starchy Indian samosas. And then a sound caught my attention: a rhythmic, friendly brightness that rang out from a stall, each note knitted to the previous one. The instrument was familiar but not stale or readily identifiable; it was not the painted piano installed at the Creative Arts Center down the street, or a folksy guitar. Its sound carried like a mountain dulcimer, like the ones I’ve heard at old-time concerts. But when I walked up to the stall, the instruments looked and played more like small ornate guitars, delicate and cherry-topped with laser-cut sound holes, in a variety of Celtic-looking designs. Although their train-like pulsing was familiar, they were not hourglass-shaped and played parallel to the ground as Appalachian, or mountain, dulcimers are. These were held across the body, played like guitars.

At the time, I did not know that the instruments for sale were pricey dulcimers on a stick. They looked simple, like cigar boxes glued to a fretboard. My 11-year-old daughter was immediately in love with them. Of course she was; they were adorable and pricey. Although I do not really believe in genetic gifts, music came naturally to her. Both sides of my family played music skillfully: instrumentalists of the banjo, piano, and organ existed on my mother’s side, while my father’s relatives had played the piano, violin, and other stringed instruments. Channeling everything my daughter had learned from a few years of laidback violin lessons, and perhaps some epigenetic flair as well, she easily located the notes she needed to play some tunes. 

People paused and listened as she transposed, plucked, and strummed songs from the lessons she had at her former elementary music teacher’s house. Her Suzuki violin songbook came to life in a folksy way; the song “Perpetual Motion” hung in the air in contrast to her violin version’s crisp notes. I was floored by how adeptly she found the right sounds on an unfamiliar instrument, impressed that she was able to transpose the songs, and, truthfully, a little smug about paying for all those violin lessons that had at the time felt like a total waste of money. My hope had been that she would be able to play something when she went to college, something to give her a little cred, like the shirtless boys at the beach who find themselves surrounded by barely clad admirers when they play Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” on their guitars. I had given up on the idea that she was benefiting from the lessons, but here, she proved me wrong. Sometimes musician-hobbyists stopped to play another stick dulcimer on display. A young scruffy man proceeded to tinkle out some classical and Flamenco-style songs as he smiled charmingly between two beautiful onlookers. More confident musicians listened to my daughter’s playing and improvised in deferential accompaniment. The dulcimer’s self-assured sound resonated with me for days.

The sound of the dulcimer has resonated with me for most of my life, the frets of its fretboard like notches in my own timeline. 

I called my father, who was in an assisted living facility at the time, to tell him about the stick dulcimer. Since he was hard of hearing and could not comprehend the pitch of my voice any longer, most of my words floated straight into the ether. He complained when I didn’t have a lot to say to him, but I stopped talking because I was exhausted by repeating the same inane things over and over. “Nevermind” became my refrain, not because I didn’t want to be heard but because being heard became almost impossible. 

But in this particular conversation, my father was lucid and listening. He loved music and enjoyed knowing that my daughter has an affinity for it. His own parents had forbidden him from taking music lessons in Turkey because they wanted him to focus on his academics, and I think he knew he would have been good. I remember him humming and singing throughout my childhood, and he loved to listen to music, even when his hearing started to fail him. In his late 80s, after writing marketing books and teaching college became too difficult, he refashioned himself as a lounge singer who would regularly break into song in the assisted living café. Not everyone enjoyed his spontaneous singing, but he did have a few fans in his dining room. 

While speaking about string instruments, he told me that his grandmother had been a virtuoso on the kanun, a plucked string instrument in the zither family, an old-world auntie to the Appalachian dulcimer. Just as I wished my grandmothers had been able to see my daughter play the stick dulcimer, he said that he wished I had been around to hear his grandmother play because it was impressive. I imagined my Turkish great-grandmother—whose photograph I’ve never seen because she believed that photography would tarnish her soul—who memorized the entire Koran when she was a little girl but refused to recite it until she was given a little lamb. Consigned to an arranged marriage in Istanbul, she was subject to the hard domestic roles of wife and mother of six children. I imagine the pleasure and power she felt when she exerted her virtuosity into her music, bringing grace and control to her sounds. Playing music, like cooking, was a process in which she had agency—and through which she made beauty. Given my father’s stinginess with accolades, my great-grandmother must have been quite an adept musician.

There have been many piano players in my family—my paternal grandmother, with a fourth-grade education, could play any song on the piano by ear, like many of my father’s relatives. He said when she heard a song on the radio she would sit down and play it herself. But since I only met her twice and never heard her play, celebrating her cooking is the next best thing.  

Just as my daughter had begun to develop a knack for transposition, playing the J. Geils hit “Centerfold” on the violin after hearing the song in the car, making sense of my grandmother’s virtuosity requires a kind of transposition on my part. I met my grandmother once when I was a baby and again when I was nearly 5, so I did not have many chances to savor her meals, but the memory of her sweet, fragrant lemonade stirred in me powerful feelings and life-changing desires, so strong that I traveled to Turkey to learn about women’s wedding traditions. My paternal aunt, who married into my family when she was a teenager, learned to cook from my grandmother over the decades, standing side by side with her in their Istanbul kitchen. Her cooking stirs me like no other cuisine. Having grown up on fried bologna sandwiches, creamed spinach, and Steak-umms, I have never tasted anything as perfect and comforting—her lemony artichokes are a culinary homecoming. My father told me that his mother was the best cook of all, and when she visited him while he was in graduate school at Michigan State University, he suddenly had more friends than ever before, who all lined up to sample her delicious dolmas and meatballs. If her piano playing was anything as good as her culinary skills, she must have been a delight to listen to. 

For years, I have imagined connecting to my family’s heritage and traditions by playing music, but the choice of instruments has confounded me.

My mother’s mother, a preacher’s daughter, born in North Carolina in the early 1900s, washed dishes to pay for her room and board to attend college for a couple of years. She and her older sister both majored in piano but my grandmother dropped out to provide for her nine younger siblings. 

My mother, raised in North Carolina, had played the organ at church in her youth. She was also the relief organist during her graduate school years at Chapel Hill. She did not continue playing the organ as an adult, but she kept a small, upright piano, and atop it sat a tiny bust of Beethoven glued to a mayonnaise jar lid, a prize my grandmother had apparently won in a contest during college. My mother played occasionally when I was growing up. I recall somber hits like “One Tin Soldier” and “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” being played at home, leaving me—a sensitive child—pondering violence, morality, and my life’s purpose at too-young an age. During holiday visits with her friends, with the help of some libations, my mother would play and belt out church hymns at the piano, especially “Whispering Hope.” But the piano always seemed too large and looming for me. My mother eventually passed it onto my older sister, who now keeps it in her living room.

Although I believe that the women who came before me would have made music professionally if it had been possible, they worked hard their whole lives under difficult conditions. My mother’s mother cared for her siblings as a young adult before marrying and having four children of her own. Her life entailed relentless farm chores and constant worries about money and food. My father’s mother had to learn to cook, crochet, and entertain, also caring for her younger brothers and sisters and, later, two children. She would wake up at three in the morning to quiz my father and make him breakfast before his high school exams. My own mother played the organ in part to give her some time away from a tense household. I imagine the pressures and constraints my foremothers experienced in their daily lives, and I can see how playing music gave them some measure of agency, beauty, pleasure, and freedom. Music made space for them—and sparked joy—where reality would not. 

For years, I have imagined connecting to my family’s heritage and traditions by playing music, but the choice of instruments has confounded me. My own musical upbringing consisted of piano lessons given by the next-door neighbor, several excruciatingly slow months of learning “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder in elementary school, and voice lessons, youth chorus, and choral camp. I won the “most musical” award in middle school chorus, where I annihilated my peer playing Name That Tune. In a conversation about instruments, my mother confided that, like me, she had not wanted to play the piano as a child; she had wanted to play the viola but her mother had insisted she play the piano and organ. Growing up during the ’80s, Liberace was the pianist I at once admired and could never emulate: I had no confident flair, no flashy jacket, no candelabra. The piano was heavy, imposing, and commanded too much attention. Choral music turned out to be easier for me since it required no hand-eye coordination or stage presence. I could harmonize and the whole point was to blend in with the group.

Considering the musical roots of my ancestors, the Istanbulites and North Carolinians, I reasoned that picking up the Appalachian dulcimer was a good bridge between old and new world heritage, a portable instrument I could play—to explore my own identity and to create new family memories. 

The Appalachian dulcimer touched on another significant branch of my identity formation: the hippies. Although I was born well after Woodstock, hippies had always felt like my people. Their openness to androgyny, earthy foods, and global outlook has always appealed to me. As a teen, I preferred the acoustic sound and conviction of ’60s folk music to the boy-band music of my contemporaries, and I would listen to Woodstock recordings on repeat in my cluttered, peace-sign-filled bedroom. During my teen years I attended a summer camp in the Virginia mountains, where all the meals were vegetarian and campers were barred from having exclusive romantic relationships, and where I’m sure the mountain dulcimer was played during our evening gatherings. After completing our communal daily chores, like scrubbing the shared bathrooms, quiet time in the cabin included listening to the camp-sanctioned tapes on the cabin tape player, including Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” and Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” Although this was also the era of Whitney Houston and Poison, our camp-approved cassettes were filled with carefully chosen protest music and folk songs. 

The camp influenced me for years. I did not eat meat for nearly a decade. Later, in college, Joni Mitchell’s Blue evoked everything worth feeling: loss, playfulness, frustration, love. (Mitchell wrote most of the album in Greece on an Appalachian dulcimer, but I did not know this until I began to investigate the instrument’s history.) The sound of the dulcimer has resonated with me for most of my life, the frets of its fretboard like notches in my own timeline. 

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What could have fizzled out as a weekend infatuation turned into a full-blown obsession, an online epic quest. After the festival, I decided that a dulcimer was something I really needed, but I never just need things; I also crave learning about them deeply from the people who already know. When the late-summer threat of hurricanes confined me to home after the folk festival, I started researching dulcimers and dulcimer makers. 

I am a person for whom learning is specialized and obsessive. My grad school dissertation explored hope chests and wedding traditions among Turkish women. Writing on a topic few scholars (or even many everyday people) purported to care about—and discovering some very beautiful, overlooked stories in the process—sweetened my sense of relentless curiosity. Reaching out to both obvious and unlikely experts, I discovered that most people love to talk about their passions. Sitting at my red kitchen table in my Houston studio apartment, I was surrounded by library books decked out in a cascade of neon bookmark tabs; flush with even more information on my laptop and my interview notes, I felt a kind of informational splendor. In trying to understand my personal interests from many angles, I’ve interviewed museum curators, jewelers, hobbyists, authors, and primary investigators on clinical trials and researched all corners of the internet. I’ve even ended up writing about subjects I never planned to, like redwood burls and bone broth. There is a pleasure in assessing the magnitude of what can be known and in having the tenacity of trying to know it, a geeky thrill of the hunt.

In pursuing the dulcimer, I learned about a musicologist who traveled to Appalachia to gather stories and songs, dulcimer makers whose awkward instruments evolved into art, and how dulcimers pervaded the West Coast music scene in the ’70s. I read the biographies of luthiers—people who make and repair stringed instruments—and dulcimer makers in Appalachia who crafted them over decades. After knowing nothing about the dulcimer, respected dulcimer brands and popular songs became etched into my consciousness over that long, quiet, stormy weekend.

Just as a line connects two points, the mountain dulcimer’s strings link people through time and space. 

I was looking for the origin story of the dulcimer in the same way that I had tried to make sense of my own mixed identity. As an American instrument, the mountain dulcimer’s legend is ripe for embellishment. It’s boxy and stringy, like a lot of primitive instruments from all over the world. Who brought over the dulcimer’s shapes and sounds to the US? And who could claim it? Asking these questions brought me to new possibilities and rabbit holes. I veered into mythmaking about the dulcimer’s origins to try to bring together my North Carolinian and Middle Eastern roots. My research was not systematic: it was guided by dreams and hunches. I will forever be the kid hopeful that the shiny glint on the ground is something worth looking at. 

My investigation into the instrument’s Appalachian history brought me to claims that the early colonies in North Carolina had included Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, who mixed with Indigenous tribes living in the area. Drawing both sides of my family heritage closely together, I was excited about the mountain dulcimer’s possible Middle Eastern origins. When I skimmed a book that suggested that the mountain dulcimer came from this heritage, I had to reach out to the author. As it turned out, she was a professor of marketing, like my father had been, and had attended many academic conferences with him. In looking for ties between the mountain dulcimer and my heritage, I found a connection I had not been looking for, one between my father and a colleague. Just as a line connects two points, the mountain dulcimer’s strings link people through time and space. 

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After the storm cleared, I called a man I had discovered in an old newspaper article online. I was surprised and glad he answered my phone call. He lived in my town, and we discussed dulcimer lessons in the future as well as his experience in holding dulcimer clinics and repairing instruments. An object that had been an abstraction was suddenly becoming real.

Soon after my phone call, the shopping started. I hunted for dulcimers on eBay, Craigslist, and Elderly Instruments, casting my net beyond North Carolina, dulcimer country. I reasoned that California would be a good location to search because that’s where the hippies had flocked. I was not disappointed in my hunch—there were many West Coast dulcimers. Mountain dulcimers are relatively simple to make compared to more complex instruments, like guitars and violins, which is why they became popular to play in Appalachia. Unlike the banjo, which was created in the New World by enslaved Africans and their descendants, the dulcimer has fuzzy beginnings. Origin stories of the dulcimer often cite Germany and France as the home of its prototypes; it was made and played regionally in Appalachia from the 1800s on, and after gaining popularity, was mass produced during the folk revival. Eventually, by the ’60s, they became very popular in California.  

I discovered a dulcimer for sale in Northern California, a brand my soon-to-be teacher recommended. I corresponded with its owner, our identities hidden by a string of anonymous numbers through Craigslist. She was looking for a “good home” for her instrument, someone who could “make it sing again.” I hesitated: I did not know if I could be a good home for an instrument I had never played.

But I did not reveal that to the owner. I had just decided a dulcimer was something I needed, suddenly and with great fervor. She told me that the instrument had belonged to a loved one, who had stored it for decades after losing a limb to disease. It had been sitting in the closet, pristinely kept as if waiting to be unshelved. I wanted to own that dulcimer; I respected its stories and wanted to make it play again.

The next day, I called my local dulcimer expert, whom I still had not met in person. “Solid walnut? I cannot recommend that for you,” he said. Although the brand was respected, the wood was not amenable to a sweet sound. He told me that solid walnut dulcimers have a solemn, dampened tone. I thought of the sad walnut dulcimer, whose owner could not play it in the 30 years before her death; its purported melancholic sound seemed just right for that instrument’s history. I wanted to play it, to care for it, but my teacher convinced me otherwise. I dreaded telling the seller that I would not be the new owner of her dulcimer. When I apologized for not buying it, she told me she was disappointed, but she knew that it would eventually go to the right place.

Before the transaction had been canceled, a series of dulcimer stories and photographs had come my way through our online correspondence. My admiration for the instrument had made the owner cry and remember her loved one. Alongside family stories, she had sent me scanned photos and tales of her relatives: yellowed photos of Daniel Boone-dressed strangers outdoors, aging loved ones in black dinner gowns on memorable vacations, and campsite dulcimer jam sessions. This dulcimer had transported me to another person’s world: one of divorce, illness, grief, renewal, and, finally, peace. I was grateful for the tenderness the instrument had given me already, even before I had the chance to play it. Her loving stories lingered around me like the dulcimer’s notes.

She was looking for a “good home” for her instrument, someone who could “make it sing again.” I hesitated: I did not know if I could be a good home for an instrument I had never played.

I found another dulcimer for sale in Southern California. In the listing’s photo it laid in an open case on a park bench, world-weary but compelling, like it had been busking for a lifetime. I tried to research its label barely visible through the sound holes, where makers often sign or label their instruments, peering at the blurry photo, guessing possible makers. I entered a combination of names and initials into my keyboard, not sure what I hoped to find or why I stalked an instrument I had never even heard. I forwarded the ad to the dulcimer teacher, hoping that he could assess this instrument. He never followed up; maybe it too was made of walnut and not worth his time. I dreamed of finding something special for a good price, but I did not know about dulcimer quality.

Possessed of a big imagination, I’ve often imposed value where it did not exist. When I was 4, we lived in an old house with Victorian-era faceted crystal doorknobs. Thinking that translucent, hard, and shiny meant precious, like diamonds, I believed we were living among jewels. The doorknobs had a certain romance, but romance does not translate to treasure. In the dulcimer world, I could not distinguish a storied, quality instrument from a kit-built one.

When I found another dulcimer on eBay, I called the teacher, still a stranger, to convince me that I was crazy to waste my money on something I had not yet played. In a calm voice, he instructed me to come to his house to “disabuse” myself of this idea. I got in the car, not really sure what I was doing driving to a stranger’s house in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Walking up the front steps, I felt nervous. Was I really doing this? Better to meet internet-vetted musicians than completely unknown people, I supposed.

An old man with a kind smile invited me through his front door. He had wild hair and identical clogs to my own, except his were exactly my age. I stepped on aged Oriental rugs as I walked through his home, surrounded by colored glass and a band’s worth of instruments. A pair of antique performance violins cuddled like identical twins in their crushed velvet, mint-colored case. 

We sat down in his small living room. He began to play a few chords, and then invited me to choose my own plastic pick and play his dulcimer. He showed me how to strum and set me free to play. Three strings—past, present, and future—unified in one connective strum. I inhaled deeply to keep from crying. Yes, this is beautiful.

I stayed at my teacher’s house for two hours, practicing “You are My Sunshine” and watching his fingers slow-dancing on the frets with quiet skill. He told me stories about his velvet-lined vintage violin cases and other treasures, and I went home happy.

He showed me how to strum and set me free to play. Three strings—past, present, and future—unified in one connective strum. I inhaled deeply to keep from crying. Yes, this is beautiful.

After I played the dulcimer for the first time, my daughter had her first youth orchestra rehearsal. I watched as her teacher tuned the instruments. She asked all the violins to play one note as she knelt down to scan their sounds. When she heard a renegade tone, she turned to and tuned the outlier with the attention of a cat stalking its prey. Slowly, she made her way through the instruments—honing their tones, bringing their sounds in line with each other. These children have vastly different interests, but they come together for the music. In this age of extreme solipsism, playing one note as a group felt like a powerful achievement. 

I think about their harmony as I think of my friendship with my new dulcimer teacher and the common friends we share from other parts of our lives. A different kind of tuning is taking place for me: I was becoming attuned to a community of musicians. 

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On eBay, I found a dulcimer that was the same make as my teacher’s. The top was spruce, which would produce a good sound. An online auction was closing in a couple of hours and I had to decide whether to bid on it. After one free short lesson, did it make sense to bid? Would I win? My husband Mark teased me through my frenzy of worry. I knelt on the floor between stints of jumping around and screeching with anticipation after I made my bid, and we watched the seconds turn over. The uncertainty hung in the air like the last chord of an interrupted song, a minor note waiting for a strong finish. What had just happened?

At the end of the most exciting 10 minutes of my life, I was a new dulcimer owner. 

I exchanged emails with the seller for a week. I learned about his profession, his marriage, his long-term habit of collecting, and his other instruments—prized dulcimers that had grazed, however lightly, the lives of luthiers and famous musicians. Our correspondence became a collection of its own, a meditation on value and shared interests, on lasting relationships and beloved objects.

I remember, while I waited for my dulcimer to arrive, how I could not sleep. I stayed up late that first night, the adrenaline from the auction too high for me to downregulate. I couldn’t stop thinking about my instrument on the way and all its possibilities: who had played this dulcimer before me, who I would meet because of it, and how joyful and sweet our music would one day sound.

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Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Ayla Samli writes with particular attention to what makes us human, including our social, inner, and material worlds. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she is working on an essay collection. Her writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, The Rumpus, Entropy, So It Goes, and elsewhere. 

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens