I'm cheating on this blog post. I have been down an unexpected rabbit hole for the last two weeks, so I thought I would do this quick...

Several people have asked how I was able to write a biography of someone whom I had never personally met, so this last of three posts...

In 1988, Frets magazine, "The Magazine for Acoustic String Musicians" featured a smiling Richard Thompson on its cover. It also...

One of the best experiences in the research for Pluck happened whenever I found an obscure source that opened many more lines of...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Emmylou Harris and David Schnaufer perform Hank Williams's "May You Never Be Alone".

Why him? Why did David Schnaufer spend years writing to Chet Atkins during the seventies--out of all the important music movers and...

I know how this is going to sound. I just want you to know that I swear it happened. I was in the middle of some serious burnout. So,...

A story behind the song: During work on Pluck--especially with respect to the years between 1953 and 2006--I would glimpse here and there...

If you're visiting this site to learn about David Schnaufer or the dulcimer for the first time, then I hope this and the two previous...