Earnestness Hurts

In a previous post or two your faithful correspondent has mentioned his fondness for the ukulele. One of the things that yours finds so attractive about the instrument is that it is so unformed. By this I mean that it has not gelled into a particular form of playing.

Acoustic guitars are usually associated with classical or folk music. Electric guitars go with rock, country or jazz. Clarinets equal classical, big band or klezmer music. But the lowly uke manages to cover all those genres and more.

This very day I have received in the mail a CD of Bach music played on the uke, listened to tin pan alley, rock and comic songs all played on the uke. It's a great little instrument and one of it's strengths is that it that it has not been niched.

On the other hand, the dulcimer, one of which I received for Christmas this year, has been niched to death. In reading over books, notations and the Internet, I see that the instrument has been niched to the point of causing it's own death. The niche for the dulcimer is earnest folk music, either American or English. A whole lot of dulcimer players seem to think that by playing the instrument they are preserving a musical tradition that would be lost unless they kept playing Barbara Allen or Boston Boy. Nothing new, nothing funny beside Little Brown Jug.

The average dulcimer player does not seem to have a sense of humor. Their earnestness is almost painful. The wildest they get is to have hummingbird shaped sound holes cut into their instruments. Or a headstock shaped like a dragon. They're either honoring "roots" America with their songs or pretending to be Elizabethan bards with songs about some character longing for his lily white lady while forgetting that Ben Jonson was an awful drunk and that it was more likely that the song sung among the costermongers was more likely to be something comic about old Jake trying to shag Betsy instead of Lancelot longing for Guinevere.

If you go through the Internet sites selling ukuleles and dulcimers you'll see that the ukes are offered with pineapples, tikis, cowboys or flames painted on the sound boards. Uke players and makers have a sense of humor. But you'll have a long, hard search trying to find a dulcimer with anything more "radical" depicted on the instrument than a hummingbird or a lily shaped sound hole. One wants for the day when some musician realizes that a dulcimer can kick out the jams.

Until that day the dulcimer will remain a painfully earnest instrument. That situation ill be good for the dulcimer aficionado, but it won't be any good for the instrument itself. It will become a new sackbut or psalter.