Day of the dulcimer: Local expert to speak at historical society event
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LEWISTOWN -- Ken Longfield's rendition of "Simple Gifts" on the Pennsylvania German zither certainly takes music lovers back to a different era in the 1840s when the Shaker song was composed.
Longfield's right hand strums the strings of the musical instrument, crafted by the Reedsville man based on one in the Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum in Lancaster. His other hand presses down on the string with a wood stick, called a noter. The zither is kind of like a guitar without the neck and way more strings.
"I built my first mountain dulcimer in 1974," Longfield posted on the Friends of the Mountain Dulcimer website where he also posted the video of him playing "Simple Gifts."
"I continue to build mountain dulcimers, hammered dulcimers and do repair work on them as well as guitars and banjos. I enjoy old-time music, bluegrass and folk music from before and after the folk scare of the 1950s and 1960s."
Although the zither dates back to 433 B.C., the metallic sound of the zither evokes images of the Colonial era. The song was composed by Joseph Brackett and was written much later.
"Hearing the sound that the instrument makes takes you back generationally," Mifflin County Historical Society volunteer Forest Fisher explained. "What you hear is what settlers heard in the 1700s. It makes quite a nice connection."
Longfield's unique sound was enough to stump musical applications like Shazam, which boast they identify almost anything written under the sun.
Perhaps, members of the Mifflin County Historical Society will better recognize Longfield's music when he appears for a dinner presentation, "The Appalachian Dulcimer," at the Penn Valley Christian Retreat, 7980 Ferguson Valley Rd., McVeytown, at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 14.
To make a reservation, call (717) 242-1022. Checks should be mailed to Mifflin County Historical Society, 1 W. Market St., Lewistown, PA 17044.
The meal is all-you-can-eat and includes roast turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, mixed vegetables, green salad and pie.
Longfield, an expert on the Appalachian dulcimer, both plays and makes these instruments which have stood the test of time. The Appalachian dulcimer is part of the zither family, typically with three or four strings running over a fretted fingerboard and originally played in the Appalachian region of the United States.
Longfield said the Pennsylvania Germans called the instrument a "zitter," which is German for zither.
A member of the historical society and retired minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Reedsville, Longfield enjoys diagramming his own instruments based on the designs of original ones he has seen at the Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.
"He gives the background of how he got into it," Fisher added. "From my point of view, I'm looking forward to hearing the history and culture of how this instrument was played by early Appalachian settlers. Mifflin County is on the fringe of the Appalachian Mountains and its culture."
The historical society has brought in other instrumental groups -- who also share a historical presentation about their various forms of music -- but that was prior to the pandemic.
"Others have done Appalachian dancing on a square piece of flooring, where they do a shuffle and tap with fiddle music," Fisher explained. "It's a break from the normal routine where a historical individual from a state museum talks about Indian culture and lecture form."