Missouri is home to vibrant musical traditions, a sign of the state’s rich artistic and cultural diversity. Every cultural group that settled in Missouri brought its musical customs, including easily transportable instruments and the skills to build and repair them. Although often overlooked, the visual and aural art of luthiery—the intricate craft, repair, and restoration of stringed instruments—is central to musical expression.

By the 1860s, St. Louis was home to multiple small luthier shops and two manufacturers of stringed instruments. Perhaps Missouri’s most influential manufacturer was the Schwarzer Zither Factory founded in 1866 in Washington by an Austrian immigrant. Employing German craftsmen, he developed award-winning, innovative, and elaborate instruments that are still admired for their quality. Luthiers were needed in isolated rural areas, too. Local musicians often served in that role, as a sideline to their primary occupations. Periods of economic hardship required creative solutions, so instruments were strung with braided horsehair or screen wire, and fiddles were created from recycled cigar boxes and other found wood.

Research in the archives of the Missouri Folk Arts Program uncovered a tribute to the late Cope Ashlock, a luthier who once operated The Violin Shop in downtown Columbia. He printed a telling motto on his business cards: where work is art and art is work. Ashlock’s philosophy aptly describes the dominant theme in this exhibit – building instruments by hand is an art, and creating art requires skill, precision, and lots of hard work.

Today, despite the ready availability of mass-produced stringed instruments, luthiery remains a living art form in Missouri. As mandolin maker John Wynn stresses, “Putting together a mandolin from a kit is not instrument making; it’s assembly. I make every part and decorative feature of my mandolins from beginning to end. I take pride in the quality of my work.”

This exhibition celebrates the work of six contemporary Missouri luthiers, all of whom participated in Missouri’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program (TAAP). All are accomplished musicians, passionate about their music and instrument making. Each learned through a combination of sources: formal instruction, mentors and peers, books, imitation, and old-fashioned trial and error. Each begins his work with carefully selected wood. Each, by cutting, measuring, shaving, shaping, bending, tuning, and finishing, turns simple boards into intricate instruments that are pleasing to both eye and ear.

Luthier techniques and approaches vary with each builder and instrument. Bernard Allen and Greg Krone use the patterns of European masters like Stradivarius, now readily available in books and on the Internet. Others, like Geoff Seitz and mandolin maker John Wynn, create their own patterns that they develop and perfect over time. Seitz, Krone, and Allen build their violins almost entirely by hand, using chisels, gouges, planes, files, knives, saws, and scrapers. Krone has an array of specialized modern hand tools, while Allen combines his love of hand methods and vintage tools.

Other luthiers incorporate power machinery along with some homegrown ingenuity. Bass maker Luther Medley and his partner, Ed Holden, opt for air-compressed tools. They engineer unique equipment powered by anything, from lawn mower to sewing machine motors. Meanwhile, Wynn blends fine handwork with creative uses of basic woodworking machinery. Instead of hand planes and chisels, Wynn uses an ordinary table saw in new ways, shaping the contoured arches of the instrument’s body before carefully perfecting it by hand.

Indeed, forming the arch out of the body’s wooden plates is a critical step to craft the best sound. In Medley’s basses, heat and pressure are used to bend the front plate into an arch. Seitz, Krone, Allen, and Wynn carve the arch into the wooden plates. As the arch’s shape and depth are slowly refined and thinned, meticulous measurements are made. Violin makers at work, like Krone, exude an air of precision. However, since “every piece of wood is different” measurements become guides rather than absolutes, and adjustments to the wood are carried out with the skill of a sculptor.

Different intuitive techniques are used to determine when the carved arch is ready. Wynn “tap tunes” by using his fingers to tap the top of the mandolin body, listening for the pitch of the wood. As he taps, he carefully adjusts the shape and thickness of the plate, which is complete when it is tuned to A. Seitz also taps on the plates but focuses more on flexibility, which allows the wood to vibrate freely when the instrument is played. Thus, Seitz thins the arches as much as possible to enhance flexibility, while preserving the strength of the wood.

Donald Graves still plays his great-grandfather’s dulcimer as well as his own. Maw-Hee, also a fiddle maker, wrote his name and the year of completion inside each instrument. Graves continues that tradition today. Like many rural nineteenth- and early twentieth-century luthiers, Maw-Hee built instruments on request only, not as an occupation. Similarly, Graves makes dulcimers by request for family members and special friends.

Bernard Allen applies his love of Ozark hand woodworking methods to instrument making, primarily fiddles and mandolins. Here, Allen holds a fiddle with a natural finish that allows the beauty of the wood to stand alone. Allen uses the curled ƒ-holes (visible here and on many of the exhibition’s instruments) as a tuning mechanism during the construction process, blowing across the holes with his mouth and gently shaving the bass bar until the instrument is tuned to F. The paired curled ƒ-holes allow sound to vibrate more freely.

Greg Krone shows a viola-in-process balanced lightly on his fingertips – a test of skilled carving. Before apprenticing with Geoff Seitz, Krone trained at the Violin School of the Americas in Salt Lake City, Utah, the first such institution in the United States. The violin school movement originated in Europe following World War II and continues to expand in the United States today.

Geoff Seitz is the only urban-based luthier in the exhibition. Because of his location, his customers are quite diverse: young and old, amateur and professional, classical, oldtime, bluegrass, jazz, country, Irish, and others. In his shop, he displays a collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century violins by St. Louis luthiers who “created wonderful, wonderful instruments.”

Wynn purchases wood locally from a third generation Ozark logger who knows Wynn’s preferences. Sassafras is abundant in the Ozarks and serves many traditional uses. Young roots are made into a medicinal tea or dye. The wood, known for strength and flexibility, is used by Ozark woodworkers as well as river guides to make johnboat paddles. Wynn once built a mandolin using Ozark sassafras – inspired by a tale that sassafras made the best sounding fiddles.

Luther Medley and assistant Ed Holden show off a Medley designed bass. After he retired, Medley thought instrument making and repair work would bring in a “few extra dollars” for his favorite pastime, “goin’ fishing.” Medley’s bass became so popular that he enlisted the help of Holden, a retired friend, woodworker, and fellow musician. Holden owns and plays this particular bass in his bluegrass band.

In 1988, Gladys Coggswell first entered MFAP’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program as apprentice in Jazz and Blues Gospel singing to Mae Wheeler, also known as “Lady Jazz,” of St. Louis. As her reputation as a storyteller and educator grew, Ms. Coggswell, a counselor with a masters degree in Education, began to focus more of her time promoting education, pride, and local knowledge through storytelling.

b. 1942
Frankford/Hannibal/Kansas City, Missouri
African American Storytelling

Apprentices:
1992 Deborah Swanegan
1993 Deborah Swanegan, Vivian Hawkins, and Samuel Williams
1995 Dorine Ambers and William Grimmett
1998 Evelyn Pulliam
1999 Evelyn Pulliam
2003 Angela Williams and Loretta Washington
2004 Angela Williams

Ms. Coggswell grew up in New Jersey and lived in New York before moving to Missouri with her husband in the 1970s. She was immersed in traditional storytelling from an early age and learned many stories from her great grandmother who raised her. In 1992, she told MFAP director Dana Everts-Boehm in an interview, “When I was very small we had a boarding house, so there were other older people in the house. We heard stories, not only when people gathered, but also from my great-grandmother, who I sometimes had to follow from one room to the next to get the end of the story.”

Ms. Coggswell focused on showing her apprentices how to tap into their own family stories and personal experience narratives. When she introduced her apprentice, Deborah Swanegan at the Big Muddy Folklife Festival in April 1992, Ms. Coggswell spoke highly of her abilities: “Our sessions together are just something that’s beyond joy. Debbie is just such a wonderful learner. She has a natural ability to do storytelling. She has a wonderful family history of her own.”

Mutual inspiration, joyfulness and respect have marked Ms. Coggswell’s partnerships in TAAP. In 1998, apprentice Evelyn Pulliam wrote, “I want to work with this master because we have the same love of our culture and she has shown an ability to get important information from our elders that needs to be preserved and shared.”

Ms. Coggswell’s apprentices spoke highly of her talents as a tradition bearer and a performer with the ability to make a positive difference. In 1993 Vivian Hawkins described her goals for the apprenticeship with Ms. Coggswell: “I would like to encourage younger people to take pride in their past and to share it with others. I believe that when people know their own history and legends they become more interested in also sharing and learning that of other cultures.” Ms. Coggswell’s generous sense of humor is reflected in that of her apprentices; Sam Williams joked in a 1993 application, “I hope to keep an audience’s attention half as long as she does!”

In a letter of support for an award nomination, historian and editor of the Missouri Heritage Series Rebecca Schroeder wrote, “Gladys Coggswell can only be described as a national treasure, and her enormous contributions to the artistic and educational life in Missouri in the past two decades are beyond measure…Whatever their ages her audiences are drawn into the world she evokes in her performances and always emerge with a better understanding of the human condition.” Ms. Coggswell has received numerous awards, including a Missouri Arts Council award in 2005, and the Governor’s Humanities Award in 2010.

Today, Ms. Coggswell combines her talents and employs storytelling and gospel singing in her role as the Storyteller in Residence at the Mark Twain Museum.

 

Audio clip 1: Gladys Coggswell discusses how she encouraged her apprentice Evelyn Pulliam to learn more about harvesters and “going on the harvest” in her community.

 

Audio clip 2: Evelyn Pulliam tells the story of how African American workers would follow the harvest north to pick tomatoes, potatoes, apples and other produce during the wane of sharecropping and how the community left at home would care for the children left behind.