SHORT BIOGRAPHIES AND A POSTSCRIPT

Robert Lewis Force

The way it all finally worked out, at one time or another I was the youngest in a family, the oldest in a family, an only child, a bachelor child, and a boarded child, and now I can lay claim to nineteen half and stepbrothers and sisters.

Eleven days before turning twenty, I won $18.50 in a poker game, decided it was time to learn how to play music, and went and bought a dulcimer from an Austrian immigrant violin maker who said he got the idea from a 1945 edition of Popular Mechanics.

In the next five years I hitchhiked 150,000 miles through forty-four states and seven foreign countries, taught myself to play the instrument, and set about communicating what I had learned to others. My constant companions were a backpack, sleeping bag, several dulcimers, two changes of clothing and twenty-five pounds of notes and notebooks. My not so constant companion was Al d'Ossché.

We met at the 44th Annual North Carolina Fiddlers' Convention through the mutual discovery that out of the 50,000 people in attendance, we were the only dulcimer players. Together, we've played on television and radio, at folk and bluegrass festivals, coffeehouses, colleges, street corners and subway stations.

During those times, people asked us to show them how to do what we do. So we hauled out the twenty-five pounds of notes, analyzed them, boiled them down, analyzed ourselves, got boiled ourselves, wrote, rewrote, changed, added to, wrote, and rewrote this book.

Albert Kempton d'Ossché

Once it was all simple and straightforward. But at eleven, I was living in California and was sent to study in New England; at eighteen it was college in North Carolina, and at twenty-two it was to be law school. But somewhere along the way certain things began to make increasingly more sense as others made less, and as nature abhors a vacuum, dulcimer playing began to occupy more of my time.

I left North Carolina diplomaed but dulcimerless. My first instrument (a three-string "flatland tourist special") found its way into my life while I was living in self-induced exile six miles from the Canadian frontier in northern Vermont.

After a few months of solitude, and the prospect of an intense Vermont winter, I decided to take a hint from the migrating geese and head south where I belonged. This notion was dramatically confirmed one morning when I woke to find my dulcimer's strings resplendent with tiny icicles and my old convertible covered with more than a foot of snow.

It was to Washington, D.C., that I went, and at just about this time, Bob and I careened into each other's lives and found that our techniques and music were somehow forming along similar lines.

I began adding to the ever-enlarging pack of notes and was seen lugging parts of them around in a backpack. Later we went to Munich, where we wrote the original manuscript, built dulcimers in a friend's kitchen, and lived the émigré life.

While Bob continued his travels, I lived in northwest Connecticut building dulcimers, teaching dulcimer at a local school, and reworking In Search of the Wild Dulcimer. But now that this book is in your hands, I've hit the road again, too...and so it goes.

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A postscript on us both...

In the nearly twenty years we worked and traveled together, Albert and I had the good fortune to touch a great many lives. We played, we sang, we wrote a lot of songs and careened up and down the dulcimer fretboard with an incurable zaniness.

We fed each other's souls and were the best of friends in a way that only music can create or sustain.

And now he's gone and I miss him sorely.

Looking back on our time together, sifting through the memories, the moments that truly shine are the ones in which we were lost in song. A reviewer once said of us that we were, "the masters of accidental harmony." I liked that.

In the process of studying the dulcimer we learned about ourselves, and as a bonus, gained a small window on the world as well. And when neither one of us was expecting it, from time to time, we also got to experience Harmony.

...and I wish the same for you.

I have been honored and privileged to be permitted the opportunity to assist in putting „In Search of the Wild Dulcimer‰ on the web, available to anyone who would find it useful in awakening the music in themselves.

On quiet moonlight nights, I sometimes sit on deck under the stars, playing soft tunes on my dulcimer. As the music floats across the harbor memories of dear friends Robert and Albert drift across the mind.

Although I am now far away from their physical presence, the music they brought into my life and the delightful times we spent together will always be part of me.



A special note of thanks to you Dear Friend Albert.
The times we shared together provide many
wonderful memories. Your spirit still sings from
the beautiful dulcimer you crafted for me. Her
voice has become richer through the years of playing.






As sometimes happens with these Œaccidental harmonies‚, crafting these web pages awakened songs in me, bringing the joys of music into my life.

To those of you who should chance to pass this way, I offer the best song I know,
    Find the Music in Yourself,
    Play Now!, Play Frequently!
captn' barefoot john