Plucky woman

in tune with

her dulcimers

By RON LARSEN

Journal Staff Writer

WEST NEWTON -- If you call Lorraine Dunn, you'll get a voice mail message that says, "You have reached the dulcimer lady."

Another apt title would be Great-Granny Dulcimer as this 77-year-old lady from Winnebago cannot only play a three-string dulcimer but she'll even build one for you, even if she has to make it out of cardboard -- and she has.

Accompanied by her long-time friend and neighbor, Mary Krueger, 81, Dunn demonstrated playing dulcimers that she has built herself at the Nicollet County Historical Society's Harkin Store, west of New Ulm, Sunday afternoon.

Actually, the demonstration turned into sort of a dulcimer "jam" when the Heartstrings of Mankato showed up to play music produced by a hammered dulcimer, which is to three-string dulcimers what an Indy 500 race car is to a matchbox racer. Well, almost.

For those not familiar with the instrument, the three-string or plucked dulcimer (although sometimes there are four strings) has an elongated sound box and normally is played flat, on the musician's lap or a table top. Its roots are very recent and very American, dating back to the 1800s in southern Appalachia.

The hammered dulcimer with its pairs of strings stretched across a trapezoid-shaped box is thought to have been invented in Arabia or Persia some 5,000 years ago. The word dulcimer literally translates as "sweet music."

Dunn, who has played a "fiddle" -- not a "violin" -- most of her life, first got the dulcimer bug when she found one for sale for $35 in a craft shop in Branson, Mo., in 1990.

"When I saw that one, I figured I could afford that," Dunn recalled. "I was on a bus tour at the time, and I sure got razzed about that thing I was bringing back."

The dulcimer came complete with a little book on how to play it, but the frets weren't numbered. But she learned to play it and decided to make her own.

"I discovered that the distance between frets was important so I finally found one with numbered frets that I could copy to get the distance right," she said.

Dunn didn't have any hesitation in building a dulcimer.

"Give me anything where you can use a hammer and a saw, and I'll make it." In fact, she's taken on remodeling jobs for friends and neighbors, as well as serving as "Winnebago's taxi," hauling people to where they need to go in her car.

But making the sound box requires bending wood for the sides. While heat often is used, Dunn has stuck with wetting the wood and "bending" it around a form. Sometimes, she doesn't have a sink or pan big enough, and she doesn't have a bath tub so she has to improvise.

Then she made another discovery.

"I started out using wood that was 1/4-inch thick, but I discovered that dulled the sound," she said. So, now Dunn uses wood that has been shaved to 1/8- and 1/10-inch thickness.

She then uses a wood burner to create designs on the sound boxes or, in one case, she hand-carved an animal's head to attach to the box.

"I've built about 35 of them since 1990, and they're all different," Dunn said. She's not into creating exact copies; there's no challenge in that for this active lady.

Krueger usually accompanies Dunn nearly everywhere she goes. Besides knitting, Krueger has a love for harmonicas, in the key of C, CC, D and G. So, when Dunn fires up the fiddle to play for audiences, Krueger puts her knitting aside, picks up the harmonica of the key indicated by Dunn and accompanies Dunn.

A number of Dunn's dulcimers -- that aren't going to her grandchildren -- go to other children, those with disabilities. For the fifth straight year, she'll be traveling to Syracuse, Ind., this summer to give five of her cardboard-box dulcimers to children with disabilities.

Dunn isn't resting on her laurels. She bought a miniature hammered dulcimer that she's trying to learn to play.

She watched admiringly as Diana Stoll of Heartstrings moved two hammers rapidly over the dulcimer's strings, accompanied by her husband, Ken, and a friend from Mankato, Mark Christensen, on guitars.

Both Dunn and Stoll had reached the same conclusion but for different reasons. Stoll noted it's virtually impossible to look at sheet music and hit the note squarely with the small hammers so she has to memorize it.

As Dunn wrestled with keeping sheet music from blowing off her music stand and having to pause in order to turn pages, she said, "I'd be better off having all these songs memorized."