Gebhard Woods Dulcimer Festival returns June 8-9 to Goold Park

The Hammers and Noters Dulcimer Society (HANDS) of Illinois takes over Goold Park for its 34th annual festival, returning with hourly performances and workshops from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, June 8, and Sunday, June 9.

The festival will be filled with dulcimer performers, but it’ll also have many workshop aimed toward beginners and children.

“We want kids to get exposed to the instruments because they will never see either a hammer dulcimer or a mountain dulcimer in their school music programs,” organizer Steve Karlovsky said. “So, our mission as the organization that puts on the festival, HANDS of Illinois, we’re a not-for-profit and in the mission of hands since 1988 has been preserving and promoting dulcimer music. We look for ways to get the music and musicians in front of people and point them out, and we look for ways to get kids involved.”

One of the performers, Max ZT of the Grammy-nominated group House of Waters, got his start playing the dulcimer at a Dulcimer Festival when he was a kid.

“Now he’s traveled the world and studied, and he’s a virtuoso performer on the instrument,” Karlovsky said.

Karlovsky said the idea of the festival is to promote the dulcimer and its different types, and the workshops provide places for festival attendees to learn different strumming and hammering patterns, how to play chords, and make music no matter their level of play.

New performers this year include mountain dulcimer Carole Ehrman, blues artist and resonator guitarist Donna Herula, hammer dulcimer champion Ilace Mears, mountain dulcimer champion David Wilson, Debbie Porter, who plays both the ukulele and the hammer dulcimer. Then there are acts like Priya Darshini, House of Waters, Bill Robinson & Friends, Rick Thum, and many more returning from past years.

“We’re trying to make it family friendly,” Karlovsky said. “It’s important to us, and that includes the opportunity to try out instruments. Maybe it’s in workshops, maybe it’s at the vendor row because we’ll have instrument builders.”

Karlovsky said it’s an opportunity to hear a completely different type of music that many people haven’t been exposed to before, and it’s not just folk or old-timey music. Priya Darshini, for example, is an Indian vocalist. There’s blues artists and new-age artists, and a little bit of something for everyone.

The dulcimer, Karlovsky said in a story with the Morris Herald-News in June 2023, can be two entirely different instruments with different lineages. One instrument is a mountain dulcimer, which comes from the Appalachian Mountains, and it’s a fretted instrument with four strings that musicians play in their lap. The other is a hammer dulcimer, which looks like the guts of a piano. It’s shaped like a trapezoid, and musicians hold a hammer in each hand and play it by hitting the strings.