Article by Ed Quillen
Local Artists – November 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
REGULAR READERS of this magazine are doubtless familiar with the name Slim Wolfe, since most editions contain some of his correspondence. If you’ve read Wolfe’s letters, you know he’s pretty skeptical about government, technology, and modern life in general. But the letters are just one facet of his life.
Wolfe’s house south of Villa Grove, which he built himself, is a lifestyle in itself. He’s a jack of many trades — carpentry, masonry, fabrics — and he builds and plays hammer dulcimers.
Dulcimers come in two varieties. There’s the mountain dulcimer, an Appalachian folk instrument with three or four strings that resembles an oblong violin without a neck. Technically, it’s a zither, and that’s not what Wolfe builds and plays.
The hammer dulcimer has a couple dozen strings, and in essence, it’s a stripped-down piano — indeed, it was the ancestor of the piano. Take away the piano’s case, so that there are just bridged strings stretched across a trapezoidal soundboard. Reduce the piano’s seven-plus octaves to a more manageable two or three octaves. Then replace the keyboard and connected hammers with two light hand-held strikers.
The result is the hammer dulcimer, which may have originated in Persia more than two millennia ago; the biblical book of Daniel refers to the court of Babylon and “the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut [an ancestor of the bagpipe], psaltery [a dulcimer relative whose strings were plucked rather than hammered] and dulcimer, and all kinds of musick.”
It’s a long way from Babylon to Villa Grove; Wolfe’s journey was somewhat shorter. It began 53 years ago in America’s answer to Babylon — New York City.
His parents separated when he was four, and he was raised in a housing project by his single mother. “It really wasn’t safe to go out and play,” he recalls, “so I spent a lot of time in the apartment, reading.”
He also displayed an early talent for music, which led to flute and piano lessons, and the opportunity to attend a very selective public school — the New York High School of Music and Art.
“I was pretty good,” he recalls, “but not the best, and only the best would go on to Julliard. The competition is brutal at that level.”
SO AFTER GRADUATION when he was only 16, he crossed the continent to enroll in the University of California at Berkeley, which sits across the bay from San Francisco, which was home to the Haight-Ashbury district and the center of the hippie culture of the 1960s.
[Slim Wolfe’s home-made house]
“I jumped right in it,” Wolfe recalls, “and what a time it was.” What followed was a marriage that broke up and a rather nomadic life that took him to Boston for another try at college (it didn’t stick, either) and by 1978, he was in Albuquerque, where another relationship was coming to an end.
He’d heard there were good jobs at the Climax Mine near Leadville. “I lasted about three days. I got fired because I got lost. You’d think a kid who grew up navigating the subway in New York could find his way around that mine, but I couldn’t.” He tried mining again at the Black Cloud, “but I almost got killed one day, and it didn’t look like mining was going to get any safer, so I quit.”
THERE WAS PLENTY of construction work erecting condos along the nearby I-70 Sacrifice Zone in Frisco and Breckenridge, “so that’s where I learned carpentry — four years on the job.” Then he moved to Seattle, where he stayed until a romantic relationship turned sour, and he wound up back in Colorado, this time at Valley View Hot Springs, where he got some steady work and thought about settling down during the 1980s.
He had already started building instruments, and traded one to a subdivider for a small lot — about acre a few miles south of Villa Grove.
In those days, Saguache County had no building codes, so Wolfe was free to build his own house any way he wanted. The cheapest building material was stone — free for the picking with every rockslide on Poncha Pass.
[Wolfe’s workshop with dulcimer under construction]
“I had to teach myself how to work with it,” he recalls, “and I made a lot of mistakes in the process of becoming a mason.”
But the first small circular structure he built stayed up through the Valley’s notorious winters and winds. Wolfe was good at scrounging materials — used windows at the top of the list — so he had some solar heat to augment the wood-burning stove, as well as a fine view of the Sangres without spending much cash.
“One of my goals was to arrange my life so that the only regular bill I get is my annual property tax bill from the county,” he said, “and I’m getting pretty close.”
He has expanded and improved his house; he now enjoys about 2,500 square feet of indoor space, with a greenhouse and shop. Three years ago, he installed a well; before that, he had to haul water. Although it’s possible to take a shower at home, “it’s not easy, and I like going to Valley View anyway.”
There remains a privy, and there is no telephone. He heats with wood, cooks with propane, and stays on the lookout for a refrigerator.
Electricity arrived in several stages, always from solar panels. At first, everything in the house had to run on 12 volts direct current, but recent improvements have meant not just more juice, but an inverter so that he can use regular 120 VAC equipment.
One new item is a sewing machine, next to a box of quilt scraps. “My mom taught me to patch my clothes,” he says, “and I always enjoyed sewing.” He makes and sells a few hats and the like, as well as quilts.
The last electric upgrade provided enough juice to run some power tools, and that’s helped with the dulcimer construction.
WOLFE ENCOUNTERED the hammer dulcimer in 1985. “I was working at a renaissance festival, and the guy in the next booth had one that he kept playing. It grew on me, so I went to the library, found a book with instructions, and built one. It was very primitive — I didn’t have any power tools then — and I ended up giving it away. But it got me going.”
A hammer dulcimer from the Wolfe shop generally begins as scrap wood from some other shop. “Hylton Lumber [in Salida] has a great scrap pile, since they make hardwood cabinets there. I’ve found oak, mahogany, cherry, maple — all sorts of good stuff.”
Like piano strings, dulcimer strings are under considerable tension. Piano-builders accommodate that by using a cast-iron frame.
Such a frame would make a hammer dulcimer too heavy, so “I use a system of internal cross-braces to strengthen the frame,” Wolfe says. “I’ve never seen it on other dulcimers, so as far as I know, it’s my own invention.” The bracing also helps compensate for variations in wood strength.
Aside from wood, a hammer dulcimer needs pegs and strings, and sometimes even these can be scrounged. Wolfe pointed to one under construction and said its pegs were from a dead piano, and he might be able to use the old piano’s strings, too.
The sound board, which amplifies the vibrations of the strings, is one piece of wood that must be purchased — there aren’t a lot of thin 2’x3′ scraps of solid but resonant wood, as opposed to non-resonant plywood.
“I use mahogany, but since so much of that comes from threatened tropical forests, I’d like to find something else,” Wolfe says.
Assuming that he doesn’t have other work — fixing a foundation or patching a roof somewhere — Wolfe takes from four days to several weeks to build a dulcimer, “depending on how much a customer wants to spend,” and the price can run from $300 to more than $1,000.
THE RESULTING DULCIMER spans from 2½ to 4 octaves, depending on its size. It has two bridges, which elevate two different sets of strings.
The most common tuning is for the right-side strings to provide the bass and the left side the treble — just the opposite of how the hands work on a piano.
The strings are all in the same key, and tuned to an 8-note scale, as opposed to the 12-note piano scale with sharps and flats. “That means you have to retune to change keys,” Wolfe notes, “so a lot of players will tune theirs differently, so that they can follow a guitarist — the most common accompaniment — on a key change.”
The hammer dulcimer appears in all kinds of music — American folk, some New Age, the occasional chamber piece, and often Celtic. The major modern composer for the hammer dulcimer is Irish: Turlough O’Carolan.
As for Wolfe’s own playing, it’s usually at weddings or “a genre festival,” like a renaissance fair. He’s generally set up on a Salida sidewalk during Art Walk weekend, and he has performed at the Steam Plant with other acoustic musicians.
“Mostly, I improvise, based on American folk tunes and traditional songs, but I also do some Balkan and Irish songs,” he said, “and I’ve got a couple of songs of my own.”
So it’s more on a day-to-day basis, rather than on stage, that Wolfe marches to his own tempo. It’s not always an easy life, and it’s certainly no route to riches, but it’s a life he keeps building for himself.
Ed Quillen sticks to writing in Salida, since he has no talent at either music or masonry.