I began playing mountain dulcimer when my then-new sweetheart, Colorado guitar builder Max Krimmel made me a dulcimer for Christmas in 1971. At the time, I was working in the mental health field, but I had played music since I first accompanied my mother on piano (whether she wanted me to or not) at age 4 - after piano and guitar, the dulcimer came easily. In 1972, funding in the mental health field underwent one of its intermittent cuts, and I lost my job of the time, working for a state mental hospital. By then Max had mystified me with the fact that he went to a lumber yard, bought boards, and made them into guitars. In just a few months we had driven to Alaska via the (at that time) unpaved Alcan Highway together, and were on the way to a stunning life together (I say that now as we celebrate 37 years together - our last big project was building a house with an 800-square-foot music studio and a 1000-square-foot workshop. The living space in the house sometimes seems incidental - oh yes, there's a bedroom, a kitchen, and a living room. Now we can really play music and make things including dulcimers seriously!)

But back to 1971 when I lost my mental health job, and Max said, innocently enough, "I could show you how to make dulcimers and maybe you could do that for a living." And so began a saga - "Well trained mental health professional becomes gypsy musician and crafts person." I built a few dulcimers, sold them, and after a couple of years and 20 or so dulcimers, I thought, "Time to get a real job in the field where I am trained - psychology." But just before I launched this job hunt, I saw a notice in the 1975 Dulcimer Player's News about the first Kindred Gathering. After attending the festival on the rainey Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, I immediately executed an about face before I ever got to that ill-fated job hunt: the Kindred Gatherers were the people with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life. I observe that psychology is a fascinating field, and playing music is a great pastime. These observations would lead most people to get a psychology degree and play music as an avocation. I got it backwards: music vocation - psychology avocation. After this, the first Kindred Gathering, took my heart away, I began doing whatever I could to make dulcimers into a decent living. I bult dulcimers, wrote books, taught at the 70s style Community Free School in Boulder, performed on the dulcimer, produced a radio show of all the music I could find out there in dulcitopia - it was named (what else?) Dulcimania.

In 1977 a Denver record company wanted to make a mountain dulcimer record, and I organized the Pacific Rim Dulcimer Project crew to do this album from my experiences with the Kindred Gathering crowd. Life long friends, these: Neal Hellman, Robert Force, Albert d'Ossché, Michael Rugg, Michael Hubbert, and me.

Turns out after I made this recording, people began to imagine I was a musician so I began behaving as a one: I toured these United States playing music for a decade or more. I went East first, and met the wonderful traditional music scene and the dulcimer players there - Maddie MacNeil, Keith Young, etc. After my first trip to the Cosby dulcimer gathering, I began touring with David Schnaufer, later with Larkin Bryant, and even later with Mark Nelson. Even more than I toured with others, I toured solo. (I am now busy wearing out my 5th Dodge Van. Should have bought stock, but then my father in his 40 years of being a traveling salesman wore out two dozen Dodges himself - it's in the genes, this traveling bug.)

As I traveled, I met wonderful players from east and west, north and south, and I got the idea that they should all meet one another. I organized the 1979 Rabbit Junction Dulcimer Festival. The final festival memory was of Jerry Rockwell, Sally Rodgers, Mary Faith Rhodes, Ron Ewing, Leo Kretzner, Alan Freeman, Mark Nelson, Fred Meyer, Robert Force, Albert d'Ossché, Randy Wilkinson, Dorsey Williams, Baila Dworsky, Larkin Bryant, Willie Jaeger, Maddie MacNeil, Joellen Lapidus, Kevin Roth, David Schnaufer, Neal Hellman, and I singing Richard Fariña's Pack Up Your Sorrows. More or less. Another good memory was Al d'Ossché and Kevin Roth together hanging on to each other and a big inner tube floating by the Rabbit Junction festival on Boulder Creek. East certainly did meet west, and I made more lifelong friends.

During this next decade, I spent about half of every year in Colorado, booking tours, playing in Colorado bands, and building more dulcimers. I had an uphill battle performing and teaching on the dulcimer in Colorado - I remember when the owner of a local coffeehouse where I hoped to perform asked me tentatively, "a whole evening of dulcimer music?" Another memorable performing situation was the Bonnie (Carol) and Bonnie (Phipps) Generic All Purpose Folk Variety Show which all Bonnies could attend for free. And I played in a Celtic Band at the local Irish pub, and sometimes played square dance and contra music for the local old time dances. For twenty years I performed with Colorado's Motherfolkers, a group of 10-15 women who put on the best-selling folk music show in the state once each year. After a 25-year run, the group called it quits, but the last CD I made with the group is still available (Confluence: The Motherfolkers) It was quite a time, and still is - I still play in many of these situations while I'm here in Colorado.

Now the Pacific Rim album of l977 is out of print, but in 1980 I recorded and wrote the book of music for my first solo album, Fingerdances for Dulcimer (still available).

I don't remember exactly when it was, but probably I first saw a hammered dulcimer during these tours of the late 70s. Maybe it was at the Kindred Gathering in 1976. But I do remember the first one that made an impression - I was performing in Dallas with Larkin Bryant and staying with Dana Hamilton's family. Dana taught me to play Paul VanArsdale's "Dulcimer Reel" on his hammered dulcimer and I was hooked. He offered to trade me a hammered dulcimer he had built for a mountain dulcimer I had built, and I was off and running in another new direction. That was probably in 1979. The dulcimer weighed 47 pounds as I recall - or maybe it was 47 pounds including the stand and a box of LPs (remember those?)

I mostly learned to play hammered dulcimer on the streets of New York City - I found that with five or six songs and some LP's I could make a dependable $100-200 an hour in front of Trinity Church or the Met. I engaged in this work-study program for a month or so and next thing you know, I could play the hammered dulcimer tolerably. Probably a lot of this success on the streets of New York could be attributed to my dulcimer - it was the four string per course monster built by Dana Hamilton which had the most beautiful and loud sound, and as I mentioned, it only weighed 47 pounds. I had no need for weightlifting at that time in my life. I probably looked like someone's country cousin (or niece - I weighed only about twice as much as the dulcimer, and was I innocent! I remember a little old lady about 4 feet tall learning over and whispering to me once, "Dear, you have too much money in your hat. Put some of it in your pocket." ) I found New Yorkers universally helpful and protective and had a wonderful time in the Big Apple.

1986 brought my first solo hammered dulcimer album - the concept album, Laughing Willow. The concept? Why, travel of course. And nature, which is my second love following music closely. Maybe third next to Max and music.

I most enjoy the doors music and the dulcimer opens for me - and I love to travel. For example, I had some of my most memorable life experiences with the dulcimer in Central America. In 1988, I saw a notice in a local arts calendar about an arts brigade to Nicaragua. I was lured to Nicaragua with 10 or so other musicians, actors and visual artists, and we spent a month in the country creating a performance with our Nicaraguan counterpart musicians, actors and artists and performing it in the community arts centers throughout the countryside. During the several weeks we were rehearsing in Managua, capital of Nicaragua, we had a house with a large front porch and the word traveled through the music community of the city that we had music happening on the porch every night. Musicians from all over the city would drop by and we played late into every night. I've never been the same - this experience enlarged on my early days growing up in Texas surrounded by the Tex-Mex border culture, and I have become interested in Tex-Mex conjunto music, and music of the Caribbean, as well as the rest of Latin America.

This experience inspired my fourth album, Celtic Caribe, NOT named for a New England basketball team, but for the Caribe Indians and a favorite musical genre. It's more varied than previous recordings: I play both dulcimers, sing, play marimba, and congas. I wrote Celtic inspired songs with Caribbean rhythms played on Afro-Cuban percussion. So far, I haven't found a sort of music that I can't play on dulcimer, at least not one that interests me. So, I'll try anything! Why not!

That's the story of how I first heard, heard of, and played a dulcimer. It's been as much fun as anything I've ever done in this short life. I still build fretted dulcimers (I'm up to 330 now), play marimba in an African music ensemble which plays music from Zimbabwe. Well, the marimba is a cross between piano and hammered dulcimer.

Next, ask me about rafting the Grand Canyon - my latest adventure. With dulcimers in tow. Now I'm working on finding more ways to live in the wilderness and be connected to the music community simultaneously… the first step was to get hired as the resident musician on a canoe trip on the Gunnison River in Colorado. Twenty of us river runners had seven fretted dulcimers, three hammered dulcimers, and two guitars, a raft, a bunch of canoes, and some great food which we took for three days of camping, hiking, canoeing, swimming, singing and playing songs around a campfire. It was enough fun that you'll find me doing it again next summer. Want to join us? Get in touch for info.

The beginning of the century finds me making a living playing and building dulcimers, running rivers, telemark and back country skiing, and exploring Zimbabwean music on marimba.

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