Appalachian dulcimer

noun

1. a modern folk instrument related to the guitar and plucked with the fingers.

Word History and Origins

Origin of Appalachian dulcimer¹

First recorded in 1950–55; dulcimer ( def. )

Example Sentences

Also we’ve spoken so much about how we’re waiting for Taylor to make her Joni Mitchell “Blue” album and there’s an entry here where she cops to teaching herself to play the Appalachian dulcimer because that’s what Joni played on that album.

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A diaphanous line that painfully encapsulates the record she released the following year – a psychic masterpiece of melody, rhythm and lyricism that pulls us into Mitchell’s interior world using the urgent pulsations of an Appalachian dulcimer.

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She took up the Appalachian dulcimer because Richard Farina and Joni Mitchell played it.

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The singer and Appalachian dulcimer player David Massengill performed a song he’d written decades ago as part of the Songwriters Exchange, an informal workshop housed at the club in the 1970s and ’80s; it was a happy jumble of ribald metaphors, tinged with a youthful vulnerability that still seemed to suit him.

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The 2014 Great American Dulcimer Convention will honor the Appalachian dulcimer, a string instrument played on the lap.

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