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Carrying on the Music

Dulcimer Player Patty Looman

by Danny Williams
Photographs by Mark Crabtree
Reprinted by permission from Goldenseal Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 4. Winter, 1995.
Always ready to go, Patty sits here by a Marion County roadside. The old family feed store stands behind her.
Always ready to go, Patty sits here by a Marion County roadside. The old family feed store stands behind her.

Friends of West Virginia music and heritage are fortunate. Most of our musical traditions live on in rich variety. Our hills were once full of fiddlers, singers, and banjo pickers, and they still are. We have dozens of musicians who are preserving the music of the legendary old-timers.

But hammered dulcimer players are scarcer. Mainly there are Patty Looman and a handful of others.

The hammered dulcimer was never as common or widespread in our state as some of the other instruments. The recent history of the hammered dulcimer in West Virginia is dominated by two men--Russell Fluharty and Worley Gardner. Both of these gentlemen have passed on, but the spirit and music of each of them lives on in Patty.

There are actually two unrelated instruments named "dulcimer." The hammered dulcimer of this article descends from an ancient Middle Eastern instrument which has infiltrated many of the world's folk traditions. It consists of many strings stretched across a shallow box. The player strikes the strings with small beaters or hammers.

The "mountain" or "fretted" dulcimer is an Appalachian invention, and has never spread far beyond our mountains. It's a long, narrow, three-stringed instrument which is usually held on the lap and strummed with a flexible pick.

Confusion over the name has drawn these two separate instruments together, and now they frequently appear at the same events. Patty is an accomplished performer and active teacher on both dulcimers, but her first love and her great mission is the hammered dulcimer.

She enlivens the West Virginia dulcimer scene in every way - as a performer, tune collector, teacher, and promoter. She even owns the largest collection of historical instruments in the state. To hear Patty tell the story now, it sounds almost like it had to happen.

Patty was born 70-ish years ago in Mannington. She recalls that music was an important part of her community and her early family life.

Dutch Looman's children, ready to roll for their father's hauling business. Brothers Joe and Jack joined Patty in this playful picture. Photographer unknown. 1920's.

"My parents were very insistent that I would be a professional musician," she says. "It's real interesting, because my dad was not a person who had a lot of education; I know he didn't get any farther than seventh grade. He had been taking piano lessons--which surprised me, because he was pretty wild. But he loved music. When Georgie Moore, the pianist for the silent movies at the Mannington Theater, would get sick, she'd call on Dad to take over. He would play from sheet music, you know, the chase scene, or the burning scene. I still have all of that sheet music."

"Mom tried to play," Patty continues. "For a while she was fairly decent on the violin, but she developed arthritis at an early age, and that took care of her. Mom liked to sing."

"And so I was supposed to be a professional musician. They really went out of their way. For two years, I was excused from school every Wednesday, and I rode the train up to Wheeling to take organ lessons. It was a two-hour ride, and I took my lesson and stayed up there and practiced, and caught the evening train back."

"And they gave me private piano lessons here in Mannington. Piano was quite important for kids at that time here; we all had to take piano lessons. We were all scared to death of her--Miss Baker. Lovely lady. And everybody that took lessons, you practiced! She had a ruler, boy, she'd hit you!"

"So then I had all these lessons, played in the high school band, went to All-State Orchestra on the cello, went to All-State Band on the trumpet, then went to Fairmont State College and took music courses."

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While Patty was growing up in Mannington, her neighbor Russell Fluharty was waging a vigorous campaign to popularize the hammered dulcimer. Fluharty was a fine musician, but was even more well-known as a performer, a personality, and a gentleman. His mixture of music, banter, and sincere corniness made him a familiar figure across West Virginia. The current popularity of the instrument is largely a tribute to the energy and persistence of Russell Fluharty. Patty Looman recalls that converts were not easily won.

"We had to listen to Russell," she says. "He always played at the Mannington District Fair, and we were expected to go because my parents knew Russell and Marge very well. And so we'd go over to the fair, and we just hated it. We didn't like the music, and we didn't like the instrument. It was the '30's, [with] the development of swing music and that sort of thing, [and I was] a teenager."

"Then at the end of my sophomore year at Fairmont State, in 1945, I went to Central Michigan University, and up there I liked speech and drama so much that I ended up with a triple major - speech, drama, and music."

Patty's degree was in education. After graduation, she worked in Michigan as a high-school teacher for 35 years. That's hammered dulcimer country, as it happens. The instrument occupies only a small place in traditional Appalachian music, but it is very important in the folklore of the Midwest. So as Patty's musical tastes matured beyond the pop music of her youth, the corny old dulcimer was right there waiting for her.

"I taught speech and drama, and did a lot of work on musicals. I came home to Mannington summers and all holidays during that time, and came to have great respect for Russell Fluharty as the years went on."

Friends say Patty is busy all the time. Here he unpacks her car to teach a music lesson at a friend's house.

"It was in the early '60's I really began to think about the instrument as being maybe something worthwhile to consider. I'd gone over to Russell's house, even in the '40's, because I was interested in the instrument just as something different, and he would try to show me how to play. But in the '60's it was really Worley Gardner that got me going."

The late Worley Gardner of Morgantown is the second major figure in the hammered dulcimer's history in this state. An accomplished musician on several instruments, Gardner extended the range of the dulcimer beyond the folksy simplicity of Fluharty's style. With his brother Asel, Worley Gardner designed and built dulcimers more complex than Fluharty's, and he was the first in West Virginia to show that the dulcimer could be played alongside guitars, mandolins, fiddles, and banjos. Sitting at her own Gardner dulcimer, Patty explains how Gardner's designs removed so many of the instrument's limitations.

"You could take the instrument and fool around with it, but to really get definite, that's what Worley did."

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"Most of the time Russell never tuned to a tuner or anything; he just tuned to whatever sounded good, and the people who played with him adjusted to Russell's playing. Russell had only nine strings on his dulcimer. (Modern dulcimers commonly have 23 or more groups of strings.) And he played mostly, as he said, `by hear.' He played in two keys, C and F, or C and G, depending on the tuning. Sometimes I'd tune up one of his old ones to the key of D, so he could play with some of the fiddlers around here."

"But now, Worley's dulcimer was different," Patty adds. "The key of A was good, the key of D was good. Worley played a lot in the key of G, and he could always manage to hit that F-sharp up there. Here at the bottom you could move one of the bridges and play in the key of C, after a fashion."

So Gardner's instrument design carried the dulcimer beyond its role as a solo curiosity. Now it could be played in the wider circle of string music, and appealed to more ambitious musicians. Patty notes also that the Gardner brothers' fine woodwork improved the tone of the instrument. "The earliest dulcimers around here were very, very tinny sounding. They used to say that a man could take just any piece of seasoned wood, and whatever wire he had, and that he would get a hammered dulcimer built. Now, the idea seems to be to make them as mellow as possible."

Once Patty had developed an interest in the hammered dulcimer, she didn't have to look far to find an instrument of her own. Her mother, Edith Looman, had long been West Virginia's most active collector of folk instruments. Patty chose an antique instrument decorated with a pokeberry-juice design and took it back to Michigan. Soon she was performing and teaching everywhere --in the Michigan area during the school year, and home in West Virginia during summers and holidays.

After her retirement from the classroom in 1982, Patty hurried back to West Virginia and threw her considerable energy and enthusiasm into promoting her instrument. She found a variety of opportunities to spread the word.

Patty carries on Russell Fluharty's work at the Mountaineer Dulcimer Club. She presides over last fall's meeting in this photograph.

Russell Fluharty, the original grand old gentleman of the dulcimer, had organized a dulcimer club in Mannington in 1971; five players attended the first meeting. As Russell's energies declined, Patty began to organize and conduct the twice-yearly conventions. Now the meetings usually attract about 100 musicians and friends to Mannington, and Patty conducts the affair with charming authority.

The take-charge manner developed during 35 years in the classroom still serves her well. Patty remembers everyone's name, and introduces each in turn for an opportunity to perform. At this event, master musicians and beginners are treated equally. When it's time for a group tune, Patty's "one, two, three, play!" gets everyone off at the same speed. The Mountaineer Dulcimer Convention is the largest dulcimer gathering in the state, and it's one of the most comfortable anywhere. Patty is especially proud that so many closet musicians have felt safe enough to play their first public tunes in this group.

As a stage performer, Patty trusts her audience and her tunes. "Most people would rather hear `Golden Slippers' and `Redwing' than hear some really complicated piece of music that they can't follow," she says.

Patty does let her listeners hear a few of the obscure tunes she learned from Fluharty and Gardner, but she always plays plenty of familiar hoedowns, smooth waltzes, gospel tunes, and Carter Family material. She believes that these tunes work on their own, and don't need a lot of help or improvement from the musician. She performs them with grace and rhythm, and without distracting embellishments or showy techniques. Patty's approach to performance is summarized in the title of her recording, Nothing Fancy, Old Favorites for the Hammered Dulcimer.

Besides her musical ability, Patty possesses a charm and sincerity which easily cross the gap between the stage and the audience. She has become the most active hammered dulcimer performer in West Virginia. Any time you talk to her, she has just played somewhere and is on her way to play somewhere else, and she always reports that she is "enjoying it enormously."

Patty is also the busiest dulcimer teacher in the state, currently seeing about 40 private students. She teaches at home in Morgantown, and drives to Fairmont, Clarksburg, Oakland, Maryland, or wherever someone is willing to learn. Often she can't be persuaded to take any payment for her teaching. By emphasizing her music's origin in Russell Fluharty and Worley Gardner, Patty makes her students aware that this is a tradition, a document of a past time which today's musicians need to understand and preserve. Patty is now teaching Worley Gardner's music to Gardner's grandson, and living around the corner from Worley's widow Margaret.

Dulcimer player Patty Looman makes a point.

Patty regularly teaches group classes at Garrett Community College in Maryland and at the Augusta Heritage Workshops in Elkins. These events offer a special opportunity for her to preach her music to students from outside the Appalachian region. Patty says there are plenty of non-teaching performances, as well. "We do clubs, weddings, festivals, nursing homes, or wherever we're wanted."

Like any great teacher, Patty commissions all her students to go and teach others. As soon as one of her beginners learns a few tunes, Patty brings them onto the stage or into the classroom. Several of her former students are now quite active themselves, playing and teaching like Patty herself, anywhere they're wanted.

On a recent recording from the West Virginia State Folk Festival, there are two hammered dulcimer performances. Patty plays "West Virginia Waltz," one of Russell Fluharty's signature tunes. Her young student, Eric Cox, performs "Redwing" with his fiddling granddad, Frank George. Listeners who remember Worley Gardner will recognize that master's style in Eric's playing.

Once again, Patty has combined good music with a little lesson in the history of her instrument. Practically all the hammered dulcimer music in the state points back to these two men. "I am trying to keep Russell and Worley's music alive," she says. "Their contribution to West Virginia's heritage is enormous." Now that list has expanded by one, adding Patty Looman's name to those of past masters.



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