Three decades ago, Warren May gave up on the guitar in favor of enabling others to make a joyful noise unto the Lord, as the psalmist commands.
Faith and music have always been the centerpieces of May’s life, but he’d never gotten beyond hacking out a few chords. Then a student brought him an old instrument found in an attic. May was a wood-shop teacher, and the youngster said his grandfather used to play it.
It was an ungainly thing, not much more than a long, skinny stick with four strings. But for May it was the start of a love affair — especially when he looked into the history of the mountain dulcimer, as the instrument is called.
“In the old days, every village in Appalachia, no matter how tiny, had a dulcimer group,” he said. “It was mountain folks’ way of fighting the isolation of their lives.”
May recalled thinking he’d try his hand at making one. Then another, and still more.
He became the Stradivari of the Blue Ridge Mountains — though with a more prodigious output than the famed 17th and 18th Century violin maker.
Currently, May is celebrating the milestone of his 15,000th dulcimer.
Among aficionados saluting that achievement is Madeline MacNeil, a noted performer and teacher based in Virginia.
“From his first to his 15,000th, Warren’s dulcimers resound with his love for the instrument, his delight in keeping alive the old-time music it can make,” said MacNeil, who for 33 years published Dulcimer Players News, the newsletter of those who treasure the instrument — which performers lay across their laps to play.
In his Berea storefront, May picked up one of his recent constructions and plucked out the notes of an old hymn that, like May’s ancestors, probably came to these mountains from England:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me!
May’s family, like many here, takes pride in having lived in the foothills of Appalachia for so many generations it has only a few clues — an inscription in an old Bible, maybe a genealogical hint — of where their forebears came from.
May observed that he might have had an ancestor on the Mayflower.
“Dorothy May jumped or fell overboard and drowned,” he said. “She might’ve had mental problems.”
If so, added May’s wife, Frankye, her husband’s all-but-consuming fascination with the dulcimer could be a kind of family inheritance.
May’s skills have put Berea, or more correctly, the dulcimer on the map. Some Kentucky road maps show a tiny dulcimer next to the dot for Berea, a city of 13,600. May’s shop is around the corner from Berea College, founded by Christian abolitionists and devoted to helping young people escape the endemic poverty of these mountains.
Because the college stressed manual arts, craftsmen were drawn here, May among them. Pottery shops and furniture makers’ studios adjoin the campus, giving the town an ambience something between an artists’ colony and a religious retreat.
For May, there’s not enough of the latter: Nodding toward the college, he complained sotto voce about the “watered down” faith handed out there. In matters religious and musical, he is a fundamentalist. He and his wife belong to an Apostolic Pentecostal congregation that rejects the Trinity as a belated invention not found in the Bible.
May is delighted the dulcimer has biblical roots. “In the Book of Daniel, people are commanded to hear the sound of the dulcimer,” he said.
He is troubled that others don’t hold to tradition. Some make knockoffs of his beloved instrument.
“You can buy a kit to build a cardboard dulcimer,” he said. “You wouldn’t do that to the violin.”
It bothers him that younger dulcimer makers tune them to standard musical scales. Traditionally, players tuned their instruments to what sounded best to their ear.
“Now, people are trying to find the mathematical formula for a ‘perfect’ dulcimer,” May said, dismissing the quest with a shake of his head.
He has the satisfaction of knowing that when a Kentucky delegation went to Toyota, courting the Japanese carmaker to build a plant in the state, it brought a gift of a dulcimer tuned the old-fashioned way. It was one of Warren May’s.
“When they went back for a second visit,” May said, “one of the Toyota officials brought out the dulcimer and played ‘My Old Kentucky Home.'”
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rgrossman@tribune.com
