Ellis and Samsel Awarded First Two Youth Scholarships

The NGFDA Board of Directors has chosen Nathaniel Samsel of Clarksville, Georgia and Bradley Ellis of Grover, North Carolina to receive youth scholarships to this year’s Fall Festival. Nathaniel and Bradley completed winning applications that described their interest in and desire for further dulcimer instruction and also described how they might give back to the dulcimer community. Bradley is the 2010 Kentucky State Mountain Dulcimer Champion and Nathaniel is the 2010 Mid-East Regional Mountain Champion and both are going on to the National Mountain Dulcimer Competition at the Walnut Valley Festival, Winfield, Kansas. The board then rated the applications on a rating scale. Board members Mike Van Demark and Georgette Willix both stated, “Both applicants are worthy recipients.” NGFDA Footnotes’ editor, Barbara Joe, said their answers on the applications showed they were deserving of the scholarships. Vice president, Tom Womack, offered his congratulations to the recipients.

The scholarships will provide festival registration for each student, a room for the student and an adult chaperone of the student’s choosing for Friday and Saturday nights, two sets of meal tickets for the Unicoi Lodge restaurant (three meals Saturday and either Friday night or Sunday morning), and concert tickets for the youth and chaperone. The Board expects that the scholars will also play a role in the festival by helping out with various tasks as a way of giving back to the community.

The scholarship awards come from a scholarship fund recently established by persons wishing to remember and honor a member of the dulcimer community who had recently died. The fund grew enough to award two scholarships this year. Those wishing to make contributions to the fund may do so by sending their contributions to NGFDA, P.O Box 15573, Atlanta, GA 30333.

• How Can I Keep From Singing and Playing This Song

  by President David Hobson

Years ago Jean Ritchie sang, “How Can I Keep from Singing,” at a dulcimer week at Cullowhee. This seemingly tall woman was frail, barely able to walk across stage in a long, forest green dress with her hair up on her head, the loose ends creating a cloudy halo around her head. She sat on a stool there and led the attendees in this song. It so happened that I had fallen in love with the song when Bill Taylor introduced it to me that year in his workshop. The words carried meaning for me, and the music soared, fell, and rose again, arousing strong feelings. Having Jean Ritchie sing it increased its attraction. For a year, I played it almost every time I picked up my dulcimer.

The Foothills Footnotes appreciates Bill Taylor and JoAnn Finchum giving their permission for NGFDA to reprint their arrangement. This arrangement is my favorite because it moves from the key of D to the key of G for the second verse, and I enjoyed the middle string’s carrying some of the melody, too. There are some stretches that may not be possible for every dulcimer player’s hand, especially in the key of G. Specifically, the C chord (6-4-3) in the third line of the second page may offer too difficult a stretch for some hands. In that case, one can omit the six on the bass string or try 3-4-3. At any rate, I hope one cannot keep from singing and playing this song.

To get the tab --> Click Here <--

• Want A Quick NEW Way To Get Your Newsletter?

• 1. Go to www.ngfda.org.
• 2. Click the newsletter tab
• 3. Enter your email address of record with the club

That’s all there is to it – you can print it out or read it online. If you’ve been getting a paper copy in the mail and decide to switch, please email gwillix@bellsouth.net and we’ll discontinue the mailed copy.

You’ll be saving the club the growing expense of printing and postage, and you’ll be easing the burden on our two stalwart volunteers who pick up almost 400 printed copies, apply postage and address labels, and mail them every month!

• Teaching Betty -- It’s Complicated

  by President David Hobson

  

•  

   

• June 25, 2010: A while back I helped my sister Betty buy a dulcimer. That was a little complicated because she has fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis and did not know whether she could physically play the dulcimer, having had to give up the piano. She needed a dulcimer with light action and lighter strings. A dulcimer maker worked with me and produced a nice sounding beginner’s dulcimer with light action. Then I messed up. Betty and I met at her condo on Sugar Mountain, North Carolina and I commenced with some lessons. It did not go well. She learned “Bile “Em Cabbage Down” and “Grey Cat on a Tennessee Farm.” When I introduced the three major chords before she was ready, what she had learned fell apart. There wasn’t much time to correct my mistake. She wound up going back to the flatlands of Charlotte and didn’t pick the dulcimer up again much at all, from what I gathered. She forgot all she had learned.

• We met again this last weekend in July at her condo, and we started all over. I was really cautious for several reasons: First, I’m not a good dulcimer teacher, at least in my mind. I know how to teach reading and writing, but the dulcimer is a whole different world with a different language. The instructional sequences that people suggest just don’t seem to work for me. Most people I have tried to teach have wound up frustrated. Second, teaching a sister is different from teaching someone not related to you. If you’ve ever tried to teach your child or another relative to drive, you probably understand. Dynamics come into play then that don’t with other people. Patience may be in shorter supply. You may take less caution in explaining things, because often you and your relative think the same way, and you may not consider that many more spoken directions are needed. I worked at avoiding those traps.

• I started over with “Bile ‘Em Cabbage Down,” phrase by musical phrase, spending a lot of time connecting each new phrase with what she had already learned. Soon she was questioning how to place her fingers on frets 1, 2, and 3, and since she already plays the piano, she understood the importance of fingering. At that point, she took to the idea of using fingering to move up and down the fretboard. After 30 or 40 minutes of hard work, she learned Part A. She had fretted simple D, G, and A chords only on the noter strings. Did I mention those names? No! - experience had taught me. She wanted to learn Part B, which I had talked about because it introduced the idea of Parts A and B and the fourth fret. She learned that part, and we worked on moving easily from Part A to Part B.

• Part of her instruction included the visual tab. Using notebook paper, I tabbed out Part A, drawing in all the lines. That confused her, and so I tabbed out only the noter line for the song. That really helped with her confidence, but she took a step back in memorizing the song. That led to a complicated question: How much do I frustrate her by insisting that she memorize the song rather than rely on the tab? Well, I chose to let her rely on the tab. Whenever she asked for tab, I gave it to her. It’s complicated, but I preferred having her love what she was learning. The memorizing could come later. The helpful tab was really, really simple, with only the notes on the paper.

• She said, “Teach me another one. We went to “Grey Cat” so that she could get comfortable with the frets 4, 5, and 7 and learn one variation of that musical phrase found in so many dulcimer songs, 4-5-7. She quickly learned Part A because only the frets 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7 are used. I did not introduce the phrase 9-8-7 found in many versions of “Grey Cat. That could wait. We went on to Part B, where I held my breath because it was very similar to Part B of “Bile ‘Em Cabbage Down. She took to it. We stopped Friday night with her having two songs under her belt.

• Saturday morning she wanted to play those again, and so we did. At one point, she raised her arms in triumph and yelled, “I’ve got it! I can play this thing!” Then she said, “What are you going to teach me next?” Since she had already asked me that question over breakfast, I had narrowed my choices down to “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss” and a very simple version of “Mississippi Sawyer. I played both songs for her and asked which she would like to work on first. I wanted her to commit to a song, but zounds! Curses! - as in Marvel Comics! She said, "You choose," and I chose “Fly Around. It introduced two ideas I thought she was ready for: first, melody on the middle string, and, second, parallel chords. I tabbed out Part A, supplying only the noter and middle string notes. There were no lines as in traditional tab. When the melody went to the middle string, those notes floated in the air above the preceding and following notes on the noter line. I wanted her to see only the melody notes, whether they were on the noter or middle strings. That worked! She got it! And she got Part B with the parallel chords, and talking about fingering there really helped her.

• Saturday afternoon, after a long hike along a trail on the Blue Ridge Parkway, we played the three songs again and again and then watched the movie, “It’s Complicated.” Betty loves that movie and laughs uproariously at it. It’s a little bawdy. Bawdy runs in the Hobson blood. It’s complicated, given we have a religious streak also.

• As I gazed at a smoky Grandfather Mountain from one of her deck this very Sunday morning, I played “Morning Has Broken,” praising a wonderful day. Then we played the songs she knew, and I introduced the bum diddy strum to her. She took to it like her white, fluffy cat named Gracie to canned cat food. Then I played “Morning Has Broken Again.” Betty said, “I know that song. Teach that to me.” I tried playing only the melody line. It sounded a little skimpy to me.

• I said, “It has chords you don’t know.”

• “I don’t care. Just write out the melody line.” And I did. What happened next was like what often occurs in reading: If a student wants to read a book you don’t think he is ready for, but he really wants to read it, he probably will, and you can teach him a lot in the time he works on the book. Ten minutes after I tabbed out only the melody line of “Morning Has Broken,” Betty had learned it because she both knew the song already and really wanted to learn it. I told her she might like to have some chords in what she played sometime or other, and if she did, she could call me and I would figure out something. And I think that will happen, farther along.

• Before she left this morning to go back to Charlotte, leaving me behind on Sugar Mountain to work, I asked her if it would be all right to write about teaching her. She said, “Yes, but it’s important for you to say I want to learn to play something right away as a beginner, not just practice notes. You can teach me as I learn songs, but I want to do that first. Also, I’m seventy-two years old, and I learned something new."

• I agreed. I listened to her, paid attention to her playing tunes, changed what I did according to what she verbally or nonverbally told me worked for her, and she learned. She said her brain hurt at the end of each session. My shoulders were tense from making split second decisions I wasn’t sure would work, but they did.

• Teaching Betty -- it was complicated; and satisfying this time around.

• An after note: When I talked with Betty a week later, I was horrified to hear her hands had swollen up and ached from the dulcimer playing - her fibromyalgia and arthritis. She hadn’t touched the dulcimer since coming down off the mountain. Sometimes our bodies become our prisons. I don’t know whether her dulcimer experience will be limited to one “I did it! If there are other dulcimer lessons, I will limit the time. Teaching Betty is complicated.

•