Vintage Appalachian Dulcimer with Picks, Songbook, Cassette Tape, and Carrying Bag. The dulcimer is beautiful, with mother of pearl inlays on the fret board and body and aquatic shapes throughout the instrument. The songbook is the fourth printing. The cassette is a recording of playing by Lois Hornbostel called "Dulcimer Enchantment." The picks are in a small envelop marked as such. The bag is made of cotton and has a beautiful Persian floral pattern all over it with a drawstring top. 

Dulcimer: 37 x 7 x 2 in. 

The Appalachian dulcimer is a fretted string instrument of the zither family, typically with three or four strings, originally played in the Appalachian region of the United States. When it needs to be distinguished from the unrelated hammered dulcimer, various adjectives are added (drawn from location, playing style, position, shape, etc.), for example: mountain dulcimer, Kentucky dulcimer, plucked dulcimer, fretted dulcimer, lap dulcimer, teardrop dulcimer, box dulcimer, and so forth. Although it first appeared in the early 19th Century among Scotch-Irish immigrant communities in the Appalachian Mountains, the instrument has no known precedent in Ireland, Scotland, or Northern England. Because of this, and a dearth of written records, the history of the Appalachian dulcimer has been, until fairly recently, largely speculative. Since 1980, more extensive research has traced the instrument’s development through several distinct periods, and its likely origins in several similar European instruments: the Swedish hummel, the Norwegian langeleik, the German scheitholt, and the French épinette des Vosges. Few true specimens of the mountain dulcimer exist from earlier than about 1880, when J. Edward Thomas of Knott County, Kentucky, began building and selling them. The instrument became used as something of a parlor instrument, as its modest sound volume is best suited to small home gatherings. Up through the first half of the 20th Century the mountain dulcimer was rarely observed outside mountain communities, with a handful of makers supplying players in scattered pockets of Appalachia. Virtually no audio recordings of the instrument exist from earlier than the late 1930s. The soprano Loraine Wyman, who sang Appalachian folk songs in concert venues around the time of the First World War, created a brief splash for the Appalachian dulcimer by demonstrating it in concerts, and was portrayed in Vogue magazine holding her Thomas instrument. The instrument achieved its true renaissance in the 1950s urban folk music revival in the United States through the work of Jean Ritchie, a Kentucky musician who introduced it to New York City audiences. In the early 1960s Ritchie and her husband George Pickow began producing their own instruments in the city, and in 1969 Michael and Howard Rugg formed a company called Capritaurus. As well as being the first to mass-produce the instrument, they made design changes to make the instrument easier to produce and to play. The body was made larger, and they installed metal friction or geared tuners, rather than traditional wooden pegs, to make tuning easier and more reliable. With only three or four strings and a simple diatonic fret pattern, the Appalachian dulcimer is generally regarded as one of the easiest string instruments to learn. The traditional way to play the instrument is to lay it flat on the lap and pluck or strum the strings with the right hand, while fretting with the left. Today it is a core instrument in the American old-time music tradition, but styles performed by modern dulcimer enthusiasts run the gamut from traditional folk music through popular and experimental forms.