When we moved to southern Kentucky in 2013, a local friend invited me to visit her dulcimer club to hear the members play. The music….well, it was love at first sound. She and her pals urged me to join, but I said “no” because I was convinced I couldn’t play an instrument. I had tried piano, but never got past Für Elise and the struggle to read music. Guitars were a mystery to me except for their music. After seeing a documentary on the great Artie Shaw, I was so enthralled with his clarinet playing that I vowed in my next life I’d try that instrument. But in this life? I decided loving music didn’t mean I had to learn to play an instrument; I could just listen to the radio and to records. But the local dulcimer club members put the squeeze on me to join after lending me a dulcimer to take home. Their insistence that anyone can play the dulcimer was too tempting to ignore.
I joined that club, then, another, and then got invited to join The Grand Old Dulcimer Club of Nashville. It was there I first heard the name David Schnaufer and a small handful of stories about him from some of the club members who knew him. I never met him; he passed away before we moved to the area.
To the right is the first photo I think I ever saw of David. At the time, I didn't know the circumstances of the photo or who took it. Now, I know it was taken by a dear friend of David's named Kelly Love whom I am glad to count as a friend. She's truly a fascinating woman and lives up to her surname.
Actually, it wasn’t the first time I heard David's name. The first time I heard his name was in Chicago in 2007, and that’s the first orthic (good-spooky) story related to this book project. More on that in a near-future post.