An Interview with Nicholas Blanton

Where did you go after you left PDS?
Unlike most of my class of '73, I didn't have a very clear life plan. I spent much of the first year loading trucks full of vegetables for a wholesale produce place off Thompson Lane. It was my first experience with real work, and it had the great merit of making everything I did afterwards seem wonderful by comparison.
 
When did you start playing music?
Not seriously until I had built my first hammered dulcimer and put it in my dorm room [at Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia], in '77. Since there was nowhere to stow it, it stayed out. Since it stayed out, I played a lot. It's not a hard instrument to pick up, and I got bitten. Good thing the dorms had concrete walls.
 
Can you tell me a little bit about your work as an instrument maker?
It's a little complex....That first hammered dulcimer in 1977 was built in a summer class taught by Sam Rizzetta. Later that fall, I used a friend's workshop in town and built another one, then in the winter Sam brought me in to help with a class building HD's.
I very slowly sank into poverty, but before my clothes wore out, in '83, Sam and I and another guy, Paul Reisler, started a shop back in Elkins. It didn't work, but it was not a disaster and did reveal a demand for good hammered dulcimers. So, I set up my own shop, told Sam I would make instruments for him along with my own and that essentially what's happened ever since. I've had a backlog of about a year for decades, now.
 
Can you describe what it was like to play with a mime troupe in Romania?
The theater department at D&E was into movement theater, and had a mime troupe there. We actually were not bad, for mimes; I mean, we actually created theater as opposed to imitating people in malls and stuff--Gus Gillette came up to Elkins once, before he began teaching at USN. He might even recall us.

[With a group called Friendship Ambassadors] We did a couple weeks in Romania and Greece. The Romanians liked the show, wanted to talk to us, hang with us. The warmest reception was in Bucharest from my great aunt Yolanda. We'd never met. I appeared at her door with a lot of smuggled food, and we talked in bad German. And we continued to write letters, in bad German, until she died.
 
You and your wife started the Upper Dulcimer Festival; can you describe it?
When [the festival] started more than 20 year ago we were hoping to bring in the best thieves --There is little hammered dulcimer repertoire, so, we steal things from other traditions--teachers and players, to share tunes and techniques. It is very much Joanie's baby; I just help out. The Dulcimer Fest has concert clips posted at http://www.youtube.com/user/akaelainesk#p/p
 
Is there an experience, teacher, and/or fellow student from your days here that really influenced your life after PDS?
Leland Johnson and John Colozzi showed me how to do history. Not just learn it, do it. How to research, organize, write it.  And from John, I learned that history is not dull: That, contrary to Marx, history doesn't have to repeat itself to be farce.