Back in Time to Older Music

I rode up to Texas horse country today to saddle up in another way, sitting for hours to listen to instruments from an older time. The Lone Star State Dulcimer Society held its 24th Annual Dulcimer Festival in Glen Rose. Two dozen acts played, strumming the strings of mountain dulcimers or tinkling tunes across hammer dulcimers, backed up by fiddles and even a single-string bass, mounting a homey plywood stage in a throwback RV camp, Oakdale Park. (That's Ken Cook, dulcimer builder and one of the festival's main supporters, hammering away.)

They all called it “old time music” for short, with tunes from Ireland, Scotland and the early Middle West of America. But the dulcimer — an instrument with the flexibility of both piano and guitar — can be pressed into more modern compositions, too. We heard James Brown (I Feel Good). The Classic “I Will Fly Away” is followed by Bread’s “If.” The more recent songs ripple with novelty on the dulcimer. The classics ring out with the instrument’s true tenor. (As opposed to the hammer above, this contestant strums a mountain dulcimer, an instrument with the soul of a banjo and the voice of a modest harp.)

Oakdale Park opened its aging arms to a crowd of about 300 performers, families and bemused spectators (I count myself in that narrow group.) Yes, it’s a dale of arching oaks, set across the street from Big Rock Park in the Glen Rose outskirts (if a town of 2,400 can really have outskirts). The park accomodates RV campers and tent-toters, but it’s also flanked on one side with tiny 15x15 one-room cottages named things like Nest, Den, Hut, Pad and Cave. The ample swimming pool was dug in 1925 by excavators using mules, or so goes the legend. Oakdale opened for business in 1960, but it has a feel of the Forties. No alcohol, were reminded religiously, is allowed on the premises. The spirits are steeped from another source here.

Ron Wilcox, my guide and good friend, acted as the Mayor of my Dulcimer-ville for the weekend, steeping us in performance and then steering us to the outer realms of the bigger town, Granbury, where a Days Inn awaited. I scribbled and recorded and photographed and videotaped, like a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter. A story seems to sing out here.