CNHI News Service

TAHLEQUAH -- Every year in May, the folks in Coshocton, Ohio, hold their "Dulcimer Days" celebration, dedicated to the stringed instrument best known for its use in Appalachian folk music.

Strangely enough, they don't celebrate Dulcimer Days in Mosul, Iraq. But they could.

Mosul is in what used to be Nineveh, Assyria. And it's there that archaeologists have found one of the earliest graven images of a dulcimer player.

"It looks a lot like the one I play," said Barbara Gibson, who plays both the mountain and hammered variations of the dulcimer. "Both instruments came from the Middle East with the Crusaders. They brought them into Scotland and Ireland, and from there they came to the Americas."

Although it may be considered a folk instrument, the hammered dulcimer was actually the basis for a more genteel instrument: the piano.

"I used to teach piano," said Gibson. "And whenever I hear myself recorded, playing the hammered dulcimer, it sounds like a piano to me."

Gibson took up the hammered dulcimer about three years ago when her husband, Fred, first heard one being played.

"I heard the sound of it," he said. "And I said, 'You're going to play one of those.'"

She's got two of them now -- one with 23 strings, and the other with 31 strings. As the name implies, they're played by "hammering" on the strings with wooden mallets.

The mountain dulcimer, however, is a little simpler. But as with the hammered dulcimer, the decision to play one was made for Barbara.

"I started playing the mountain dulcimer years ago, when my sister decided I was going to play mountain dulcimer," she said. "I think she needed someone to play along with."

The mountain dulcimer -- also known as the Appalachian dulcimer, the lap dulcimer, the Kentucky dulcimer, and the hog fiddle -- only has three strings, usually tuned to "fifths," which consist of a root note and the fifth note of its scale.

"There isn't really one standard tuning for a mountain dulcimer," said Gibson. "But a lot of people use what we call the 'parent tuning,' D, A, D."

According to Carl Farinelli, the "old" way of playing a mountain dulcimer was to fret only one string (one of the D's in the parent tuning) with a wooden "noter" while letting the other two strings "drone," thus imitating the style of sacred vocal music.