ARTS + CULTURE
THE SOUND OF
HOME By Clay Lester
“I’ve been involved in music all my life,” muses Mark Eubank, as his eyes shift from mine to the menagerie of meticulously handcrafted dulcimers hanging above the fireplace. “My dad played the guitar and the harmonica, and he sang. He had a family quartet—my earliest memories are of hearing them practice as I went to sleep. And sometimes Dad would play the guitar and sing me to sleep; he had this deep bass voice that would just rattle the windows. I wasn’t blessed with that bass voice,” Mark chuckles in his sharp tenor. As we sit across from one another in the rustic cabin nestled behind his house, Mark reminisces on the people and circumstances which drew him to first begin crafting Appalachian dulcimers nearly 17 years ago. As a mechanic, musician, and minister, Mark’s father instilled in him the virtue of hard work and the curiosity to “tinker” with things. For Mark, this translated to woodworking, of which he has been a student and practitioner for as long as he can remember. Although Mark was a skilled woodworker, it wasn’t until a chance encounter with a fellow craftsman and musician at
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THE MOUNTAIN SPIRIT | FALL 2013
a particularly slow craft show that he began to hone in on what would eventually become his niche in the woodworking community. On the second day of the show, Mark brought out his guitar and a gentleman from Texas brought out his dulcimer and they played together to pass the time. In the midst of their playing, the gentleman began to challenge Mark to make a dulcimer of his own. “You ever think about building these? This is what you ought to be doing; you ought to be building dulcimers, because I can see you take pride in your work,” the older gentleman suggested. “Son, any old man with a jigsaw and a piece of wood can make toys and sell them for nothing— you’re never gonna make a living doing that.” After carefully inspecting the dimensions and measurements of the gentleman’s dulcimer, particularly the fret board, Mark began work on his first dulcimer. By the time he was halfway finished, he was already considering changes he could make to the next one. When the final product actually played and noted true, Mark was hooked. The Appalachian (or Mountain) dulcimer emerged in the early 19th century within Scotch-Irish immigrant communities settled in the southern part of the Appalachian mountain region. This iteration of the dulcimer was something new, although it did share some
