Essentially, a fiddle is a violin whose bridge is somewhat flattened so that it is easy to bow two strings at a time. This technique is used to create the drones so reminiscent of Irish and Scottish music. (To accompany Joe for a particularly celtic melody, devil puppet Willy plays a bagpipe-like drone on the forge bellows.)

In the early 18th century, a great many Scotch/Irish settled in the mountains of West Virginia. Isolated, the musicians here were not so affected by English Country Dance Music, which was popular on the eastern Virginia plantations ( see article on music history in Ben's Canoe ). The fiddle tunes from this region remain remarkably celtic. This is clearly demonstrated by the, fortunately preserved, fiddling of "Edden" Hammons and Emmet Lundy.

Thanks to David Lynch: www..oldtimemusic.com

A good fiddler was highly respected and prized in the community. Old-time music was dance music ; it was also parlor music, as well as ballads, accompanied or unaccompanied. It was not concert music. Each region, even each county, had unique styles. Until recently, the tunes and songs were passed on exclusively by oral tradition.

The precursors of the instrument now known as the banjo came from Africa to America, probably via the West Indies. The banjar, or bangie, or banjer, or banza, or banjo was played in early 17th century America by Africans in slavery who constructed their instruments from gourds, wood, and tanned skins, using hemp or gut for strings.
It appears that the more or less standard 18th century banjo had four gut strings and was frettless. In the early 19th century, a high pitched thumb string pegged halfway up the neck was added. Eventually, metal strings were used instead of gut, and fretts were added.

Valerie, as Joe's wife, Mabel, plays a copy of an early 19th century banjo, which is still used today for playing old time music ( like Frank's but with fretts ). Joe and Mabel play : The Grumbling Old Man & The Growling Old Woman.

There is no mention of whites playing banjos before the winter of 1773-74. Then, Philip Fithian, a plantation tutor, wrote to his diary in somewhat scandalized terms that two of his charges, teen-age boys, had been up all night "playing banjers with the negroes." The boys were taking guitar, pianoforte, and violin lessons at the time.

Trusting Fithian's report, we can deduce that a generation or so after the banjo first came to be known in Virginia : the planter class still had a prejudice against the instrument, that it was beginning to attract the attention of young white musicians, and that it was still mostly played by Afro-Americans.

Thanks to Odell McGuire

Old-time music has its roots in the mid-1800s when, presumably, somewhere in the rural American South, an Irish fiddler met an African banjo player, and the two of them sat down and played tunes for hours and hours until a groove, neither Irish nor African, developed : a loping, driving, hypnotic rhythm that compelled people to dance wherever they were standing until they fell over from dehydration.

Thanks to the BBC: www.American Southern Old-Time Music

Dulcimer comes from the Latin and Greek words dulce and melos, which combine to mean « sweet tune ». The dulcimer probably originated in the « Low Countries » around 1400, shortly after an inexpensive way was discovered to make strong metal strings.The dulcimer is a close relative to the psaltry, the chief difference being that the psaltry is usually plucked, whereas the dulcimer is usually struck. Earliest varieties were rather simple, like the tambour de Béarn. Throughout the late middle ages and the Renaissance, the dulcimer remained a somewhat popular, low-class instrument in both eastern and western Europe. It was called tympanon in France, hackbrett ( literally « chopping board !) in Germany, cymbalom in Hungary, santouri in Greece and santour in India, Turkey and Iran.

The earliest reference to its use in America is 1717, in Salem, Massachusetts. Dulcimers were reasonably common instruments in the US during the 18th and 19th centuries, but rather scarce after the late 19th century when pianos became fashionable. However, for some backwoods areas, portability and simplicity made the dulcimer much more practical than the piano. These attributes probably led to its association with the lumber camps of Maine and Michigan. It is still referred to as a lumberjack's piano in the North. However, the funniest American apellation for the dulcimer has got to be : whamadiddle.

In Appalachia, the term dulcimer has been misused to name the fretted instrument originally brought from Germany: the sheitholt, which is similar to the épinette de Vosges. For the sake of clarity, this strummed instrument is now referred to as the fretted or Appalachian dulcimer, and the other is called hammered dulcimer. Still, the hammerd dulcimer is widely used for Appalachian (and Irish) music too. Ours is used to accompany Kesh Jig

Thanks to Nick Blanton