Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music recently held its 75th Anniversary Party, and I felt fortunate to be invited. It was a most...

If you're not sure what a "Nudie suit" is in the context of country music, you might want to read here before you start reading this...

There was hardly a piece of research for Pluck that didn't yield useful information for telling David's story. Ironically, one of the...

Today I want to write to you about this lovely woman, Nancy Barker. She is one of the reasons that the subtitle for Pluck reads, "The...

Crawling back from the misery of a very bad cold, I have been catching up with emails. A few in particular came from Tom Harleman who...

For anyone new to the dulcimer, you may not know that much of the dulcimer music canon comes from fiddle music. I loved this brief clip...

One of David's most endearing songs is "Sarah", based on a real person named Sarah Melton. He loved the 1911 backstory so much that he...

In my last post, I wrote about "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood". I heard it for the very first time earlier this week. Bob Force had...

The researching and writing for Pluck was a gargantuan learning experience on a number of levels. And the learning continues, thanks to...

The first time I visited the Schnaufer archive at Vanderbilt University was several years before I ever had an inkling I would plunge...

Once upon a time, the scruffy, west coast hippies who called themselves the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band broached the subject of collaborating...

Jan Pulsford was one of the biggest surprises of all the people who informed the research for Pluck. She is Welsh-born, but lives and...

Toward the end of Pluck, you'll read about David and Butch Baldassari's interview and performance on the 2005 radio program, "Wood Songs...

Writing on this project has enabled me to get to know and learn from a whole host of remarkable and talented people, some from within the...

In a recent blog post on a different topic, I shared a video of two of David's young students/collaborators performing "Hey Little...

"Harris Picking" was David's first submission to Dulcimer Players News.* It appeared in 1979, and he was twenty-six years old. Allow me...

When I started the Pluck Blog, I envisioned putting up posts that followed the chronology of Pluck, but I've made an executive decision...