[calm music] ♪ - The island was always full of grapevines, and most every family on the north end of Roanoke Island had a scuppernong grapevine in their yard.

- [Elizabeth] Coming up next on Best of Our State, we'll meet a Mantio couple that became the longtime caretakers of the mother vine.

- There was a sweet aroma of grapes.

Everything smelled like grapes, - [Elizabeth] And how the hammer dulcimer found a home on the Blue Ridge.

- I was available for anything and music all of a sudden, just came pouring into the void.

I was just lost in the music.

It was so much fun.

- [Elizabeth] We dip into treasured stories for a look at all the beauty and character of North Carolina.

- Hello, I'm Elizabeth Hudson, editor-in-chief of Our State magazine and your host.

The hammer dulcimer is a stringed instrument dating back to the Middle Ages in Europe and has echoed through rural America for more than two centuries.

During the folk revival of the 1970s, its gorgeous sound caught the ear and heart of Black Mountain's Jerry Read Smith.

[peaceful music] - It's an unbelievable thing to make music.

I never really thought much about it until I got a hammer dulcimer.

I had no idea that it would change my life forever.

Every morning that I wake up, I'll walk out onto my deck and I'll just look at the mountains and the view, the studio and the workshop.

I just cannot believe I've ended up here.

For the first few years, my workshop was in my house, but I got tired of finding, you know, sawdust in the lettuce drawer.

So I built the workshop.

I design, and then I build, and then I evaluate and I keep doing that.

966 hammer dulcimers later, I'm still trying to build a better one than the last one I made.

It's like an impossible dream in a way, but it keeps me really motivated.

The secret of building a hammer dulcimer is balancing a necessary structure to support a couple of thousand pounds of pressure on that little soundboard.

That's gotta be strong, and yet it has to have tonal quality.

And I sort of find the boundaries between structure and tone.

What I want the instruments I make to do is function correctly, and then it attains its own beauty.

[peaceful music] Each one of these gauges, I've come to determine that it's the best diameter to carry that pitch at that particular tension.

If I go too big in diameter, it can sound clunky.

If I go too thin, it can sound thin and it might break.

It is a little bit of a puzzle that really has taken me years to determine what I think are the best strings to put on each and every course.

It has to go from a warm, full bass sound up to a clear, sparkling crystalline treble sound.

And there needs to be a nice transition between all those notes.

So you have to learn how to tune it, and you have to be willing to deal with that.

And I think there's probably a huge segment of the population that would never want to deal with it.

A hammer dulcimer is a little bit more to handle than an average musical instrument because of the number of strings.

So I think that's one of the reasons its popularity has been somewhat limited.

It requires attention.

It's almost like a pet, you know, you've gotta feed it and you've gotta, you know, make sure it's warm at night.

It's a little bit unusual in those terms.

And so I think that automatically limits the performing audience.

For someone like me who absolutely was enchanted by the sound, captured my imagination immediately.

This is history, all right.

This is the first hammer dulcimer I ever built.

Made it in 1975 in my dormitory, and it's just got one bridge.

It's a real simple version of one.

Just cement nails to hold the strings on this side, regular harpsichord or auto harp tuning pins on this side.

And then just this single bridge.

It was just so much fun to play.

It was just a blast.

Two little hammers, one in each hand, just like dancing on the strings with the hammers just dancing.

I was available for anything and music all of a sudden, just came pouring into the void.

Oh man, I was lost.

I was just lost in the music.

It was so much fun.

[peaceful music] The very first song I ever learned, I learned from David Holt.

He came to study the music in this area and he started an Appalachian music program at Warren Wilson College.

And I called him up on the phone and said, I need to learn a song.

So he hummed the notes and I followed the melody and I learned how to play my very first song, called "Over the Waterfall", over the phone from David.

[happy country music] - We can still play it.

[laughs] So Read, you and Tom Fellbaum were my first students in the Appalachian Music program when I started that at Warren Wilson College in 1975.

- Yeah, I remember that.

- It wasn't that far back, was it?

Yeah.

I'm afraid it was - John McCutchen was playing at Warren Wilson.

- That's right.

- You brought him in.

- Yeah.

- When I watched John McCutchen play, I thought, wow, man, that's impossible.

'Cause I sat behind him all night and watched him, and I tried as hard as I could to see what strings he was hitting, and I.

- You can't see.

- You can't see it.

- Well, the thing that's hard about this instrument that people don't realize is that the notes just keep ringing.

And if you make, if you hit a bad note, I mean, it lets everybody know and it lets everybody know for about another 30 seconds, you know?

[laughs] - Well, then you hit a whole bunch of really good notes after and try to blend it in, you know?

- That's right.

But it takes real precision.

- It's a very precise instrument.

And the other thing is, you're moving so far, like the banjo, I'm just moving maybe a couple of inches, but you're moving a matter of a foot.

- Yeah, sometimes.

- To get a note, right?

- I love the mute that you have on there, that's a nice little touch.

- You - Can mute it, it sounds a little bit like a marimba.

Could you tell that?

- Yeah, let's play just a like bit of that.

- A little bit like a marimba, like what I was doing right there.

- Yeah.

- You take it off.

- Get that super.

- And then you can stop it if you want to.

- Oh, that's really nice.

- Yeah, it's a nice addition.

It really doubles the potential, the dynamic potential urgency.

- [David] I was really amazed to see that you built your own little concert hall next to your house.

- [Read] Right.

I thought, boy, it'd be nice to have a really nice place to play where we could keep the instruments all the time.

I can play the instruments, I can be inspired, I can record it.

Testing, test, test, test.

- Yeah, I just turned on the gain on that.

- [Read] So I decided to build a little studio.

The studio expanded into a place where I could actually hold concerts and have people come and hear the music.

It is just such a pleasure for me to invite to the stage, a great friend, treasure in North Carolina, David Holt.

[audience applauds] - I've played it, I guess, what, three or four times.

And what I love to do is come up here and work up a bunch of new material, just to see what's working.

♪ Well, first to go to Nashville ♪ ♪ Denver to Maine ♪ ♪ Asheville to Georgia and do it all again ♪ ♪ Oh, honey babe ♪ - [Read] Most of the people that play here play on bigger stages with big, bright lights.

And here the neck of your guitar is about 18 inches from the person in the front row.

♪ Don't you wanna go ♪ - [David] Well, you gotta play smaller too, so you've gotta tone everything down.

And it's always good to remember how to do that.

So it's just a bow, stick with a string on it.

Clearly the oldest string instrument in the world, you put it up to your mouth and play it like this.

You move your mouth bigger or smaller and it changes the note a little bit.

Now, there's no song about the drovers that used to come through Asheville and drive the cattle and pigs all the way to Charleston.

This is from about 1800 to 1850.

It was the thing that drove, it was the economic force of the mountains in those days.

Well, the trains came in and put it outta business, and so I wanted to write a song about it.

[jaw harp music] ♪ Well it takes three months on the drovers road ♪ ♪ to get these hogs to market ♪ ♪ Oh, I'll come back with a wagon loaded ♪ ♪ and a few coins in my pocket, trading hog China dishes, ♪ ♪ coffee, guns, and salted fishes ♪ ♪I may never know what rich is ♪ ♪ All i do is burn ♪ [jaw harp music] ♪ Now, drover's work is never done ♪ ♪ He's going or he is coming ♪ ♪ I'll drive these hogs to Charleston, ♪ ♪ 10,000 hooves drumming ♪ ♪ or trading hogs for China dishes, ♪ ♪ coffee, guns, and salted fishes.

♪ ♪ I may never know what rich is.

♪ ♪ All I do is burn them ♪ [jaw harp music] [audience applauds] - Thank you.

- It's a glorious new time of my life.

I have moved from the blue collar worker who is drilling pin blocks and sanding and spraying instruments and doing all this stuff.

I've moved into a teaching role and now I get to teach.

And if you could loosen the other side just a little bit.

I don't have to be worried about the day-to-day stuff, and it's set me free to really think about other aspects of design, improving the structure and capturing the sound.

I can focus entirely on that now.

- Hammer dulcimer music is like music set free.

As you play, notes explode off the strings and off the soundboard, and they just, they go out into space wherever they wanna go.

With the hammer dulcimer, you spend the majority of your time in space.

It's only that split second that the hammer strikes the string that you're actually in contact with the instrument.

That's where some of the magic I think, really comes from.

It's that intimate point of contact with the music.

- [Elizabeth] For more than half a century, a Mantio couple embraced the role as loving caretakers of what is thought to be the oldest cultivated scuppernong grapevine in America.

- Looking at this property and coming up here, there were no other houses except an uncle and two nephews.

The uncle had said to Jack, I wish you and Estelle would come up here because my wife gets really lonely, and she would just love to have y'all up here and you can pick whatever piece of land you want.

And this was the piece left.

- [Elizabeth] Jack and Estelle will be forever remembered and entwined as keepers of the vine.

- [Jack] It's never really mattered to us how it came here or why it was here, but we felt the necessity to try to protect it as much as we could.

If it needs something, what does it need?

Well, almost every morning is the best time of the day for me.

I've always loved early mornings and I like to make my coffee, sit in the chair and just kind of meditate.

I enjoy watching the sunrise.

Frequently when I'm looking out over the water that comes to mind about how much things have changed in my lifetime.

It was a young boy's dream to have a home on the water, look out and enjoy the view that's offered every day.

Across the way is Jockey Ridge.

It's not growing in height, it's growing in diameter as all the hills do in this area.

They move to the southwest.

My parents and grandparents that were here on the island said that the island was always full of grapevines and most every family on the north end of Roanoke Island had a scuppernong grapevine in their yard.

The north part, being a sandy soil, is what the grapevines look for, but the rest of the island and the south part of the island, there were very few grapevines down there, and so the grocery stores had a market for 'em.

My first money that went in my pocket that I made, came from the sale of grapes off the grape vine.

Old scuppernong grapes In 1939, I was picking some grapes at my grandmother's and grandfather's yard when saw a lot of smoke.

My grandfather had an old Model T truck.

He said, let's ride downtown and see what's happening.

It was quite a scene, major fire in town that destroyed probably 50, 60% of our town waterfront with what stores and post office and everything on the waterfront.

At the time that I first spotted the fire, I was on top of the grapevine picking grapes.

When we first moved here, which was 1957, I think it was, the grapevine I knew all about and knew it was there and we knew we joined it.

- The vine ties you and I together for all these years.

- Yeah.

First important thing to us was the fact that that's our neighbor.

That's a good neighbor.

We won't have any hard times with each other.

With its age, you never know what to expect, I guess.

But the harshness of the winter doesn't really concern me about the vine.

I figure it's has been here this long and done well.

That weather's not going to be the key to a problem with it.

The main thing is to make sure that it starts to bud around everywhere.

We haven't had the weather that will bring it out, but I think it's coming.

In the early part of spring, as it changes over the warmer weather, the sap begins to rise.

Frequently when I'm looking out over the water, there's never a time that I can't sit in the chair there and look out and see something I'm real happy to look at and enjoy and appreciate the fact that it's there, and that I'm here to see it, and how lucky I am to still be here.

In the spring when it first starts to come back, and the first thing you know, you see little sprouts making off, and then the leaves start.

It goes through just about the same stage every year.

When that grape vine has green leaves, they stay green, no matter how much a lack of rain that we may have.

Our yards may turn brown, some of our trees may turn, but that grapevine feeds itself.

It has, as most people say, as much root in the ground as it does vine on the top.

There was some researcher from a college that came here, who had tried to determine the age.

At that time they started talking about in excess of 400 years old.

The theory that it was probably the first cultivated vine in America.

It was the old mother grapevine.

How the Mother vine got here, I really don't know.

There have been so many stories and everything from the fact that it was brought over by the lost colony to where the Indians cultivated.

- [Estelle] One of them said they were sure that the colony had cuttings on that ship from the scuppernong grape that they brought over at the time they actually landed in this area.

Another one that when they arrived, there was a sweet aroma of grapes.

Everything smelled like grapes.

Which was right?

No one would ever know.

- [Jack] Only thing I can tell you is I know that it's been here 90 years.

It's never really mattered to us how it came here or why it was but we felt the necessity to try to protect it as much as we could.

It was about three or four years ago.

It came as a surprise.

Everything was doing normal.

I noticed some browning in the leaves, right on that power pole.

The power company, they were going all over Roanoke Island and they were actually spraying and cutting the clearance of the power lines.

Probably didn't even know what they were spraying, didn't realize it was a grapevine that was important to anybody, and that spraying had started advancing real fast into the mother vine, and it looks for the roots to kill the vine.

So then I knew we had to cut back onto the vine.

We got a hold of a person down in Wilmington, and he cut a piece of the vine and said, you see the little brown in there?

I said, yep.

He said, that's poison.

So I've got to cut further back on this vine than that.

From the day that he came and started cutting the vine, it was probably six weeks.

He did get ahead of it, and he did stop it.

The power company, they were as cooperative as anybody could ask anybody to be.

I'm so happy that it did work out that way and that the vine is, in my opinion, over the shock of the poison, and I hope the vine appreciates the protection that we're trying to give it.

I've had such a great life.

No complaints.

- Good morning.

- Good morning.

Maybe my lifespan has something to do with how much association I've had with scuppernong grapes.

Who knows?

I can't say it does.

I can't say it does.

Only thing I know is I'm still enjoying it.

- You see?

Oh yeah, I see them now.

Sure.

I haven't given it as much time as Jack, but I love the vine, and it's part of me.

- [Jack] Even today, when the time is right, you could ride anywhere up in this Mother Vineyard area and you get that aroma, a sweet, delicious smell from the old mother grapevine.

- [Elizabeth] Thank you for joining us for Best of Our State.

We have enjoyed sharing North Carolina stories with you.

See you next time.

[peaceful music] [peaceful music] [peaceful music] [peaceful music] [peaceful music] [peaceful music] [peaceful music] [peaceful music] - [Announcer] More information about "Our State" magazine is available at ourstate.com or 1 800-948-1409.