The Undermain Icons series profiles Kentucky artists whose work has achieved national or international recognition — yet whose stories, creative processes, and connections to the Commonwealth remain largely untold. Made possible with the support of the Kentucky Historical Society and Kentucky Arts Council.

September 2026

Songs from the Wood

Kentucky instrument maker Homer Ledford: 
A pocketknife, a basement workshop, and the rebirth of the Appalachian dulcimer

By David T. Miller 
Contributing Writer

The wood spoke to the boy. Not the woods, as in the forest — but specific pieces of wood, as if something were trapped inside. In a tiny, isolated Tennessee mountain community in the 1930s, there was little to distract him from listening for it. With the pocketknife he always carried, he carved any scrap of wood or birchbark that caught his interest. 

The Ledford family didn’t have a lot, but there was plenty of music around. A cousin played fiddle, and many itinerant musicians passed through. Sometimes, when the weather was right, a battery-powered radio could bring the Grand Ole Opry and the Carter Family into the deep hills of the Upper Cumberland, where the Ledfords lived. And everyone sang in church, in the old shaped-note style. 

At first, Homer carved small birds or animals, but he soon realized he was trying to set free not a shape but a sound. As Homer recalled in an interview with Gerald Alvey, author of Dulcimer maker: The Craft of Homer Ledford, "When I got my first pocketknife, for Christmas, at age 12, I tried to make a musical instrument. I guess that's when it all really began.'" 

At 11, he crafted a crude fiddle from matchsticks and a lard can. It soon fell apart, but he wasn’t deterred. When he turned 15, he built a mandolin from a catalog advertisement, though he’d never seen one in person. Then he decided to make a fiddle. He cut down a maple tree near his house, cured the wood in his father’s hog lot, and dried it over the family’s cook stove. This one held together and is still playable decades later.

Natural powers

Homer’s young life changed course when he contracted rheumatic fever at 18. The recommended cure at the time was rest and fresh air, so he was sent to the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, on a “recuperation scholarship.” The school, set deep in the state’s western mountains, wasn’t a rest home but a center for preserving and teaching Appalachian culture: folk dancing, singing, pottery, storytelling. It had an especially strong tradition of skilled woodcarving. The school’s mission was to help young people “take advantage of their natural powers and make their life in the country better, more efficient and more interesting.” Ledford would return there regularly for more than two years.

At Campbell, he learned to use his knife and other woodworking tools more precisely. A quick study, he was regarded by the school as a model student of the region’s woodcarving tradition. One teacher also recognized his musical talent and gave him her fiddle, an old German one. He fixed it up and learned to play it. At the school he also saw his first lap dulcimers up close, including one built by the noted singer and collector John Jacob Niles.

Edna Ritchie, sister to prominent folksinger Jean Ritchie, worked at Campbell. The Ritchies were one of the best-known ballad-singing families in the region, and Edna showed Homer her lap dulcimer. He quickly learned to play it, fascinated by its simple construction and sweet, delicate voice.

His skill with wood apparent, Campbell’s woodshop instructors asked him to repair two dulcimers, which he did, learning in the process how they were built. Shortly afterward, several visitors asked where they could buy their own dulcimers, and Ledford stepped up, making eight in that first batch at $20 apiece — a lot of money for a mountain kid in the 1940s.

When he recovered from rheumatic fever, the tall, thin boy returned home and told his mother and father what he’d learned and what he hoped to build. His grandmother reminisced about the dulcimer music she’d heard when she was younger. 

The Appalachian instrument

The lap dulcimer, sometimes called the “dulcimore” or Appalachian dulcimer, is an hourglass-shaped fretted zither played across the lap (and distinct from the larger hammered dulcimer that’s played with light wooden mallets). It remained little known outside the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, Southwest Virginia, and Western North Carolina. 

By the early 1900s the quiet instrument was in danger of being drowned out by mail-order guitars and banjos, phonographs, and radio. Kentucky poet laureate and novelist James Still once lived in a cabin owned by a prominent dulcimer maker and in Still’s 1935 poem When the Dulcimers Are Gone the instrument stood in for a vanishing mountain culture. Where, he asked, would dulcimers be heard when their “lean fretted necks / Are slain maple stalks, their strings dull threads of rust”? 

Ledford may not have been familiar with Still’s poem, but he seems to have sensed the same thing: that something important was being lost. 

He started building more dulcimers soon after returning home from Campbell and already seemed to have a long-term plan. He glued a small paper label with his name inside the first few dulcimers he made, but soon created a stamp with his name and a space for an instrument number. Every one of the thousands that followed carried that stamp.

His early dulcimers followed the Amburgey-Thomas pattern, but dulcimer makers had always valued practicality over ornament, and Ledford soon began tinkering. Beyond a basic hourglass shape, there was no “correct” version. At Edna Ritchie’s suggestion, he added a fourth string, giving the instrument a bigger voice, and calculated the placement of the frets more closely. He used his knife to personalize each instrument, carving scrollwork into the fingerboard or shaping a bridge.

He demonstrated his dulcimers at local music festivals, and their popularity encouraged him to take the work seriously. In 1949 he enrolled at Berea College where he met his wife Colista, then transferred to Eastern Kentucky University's industrial arts program. He graduated in 1954 and began teaching high school.