Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 25, 1994 TAG: 9411080049
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BEDFORD LENGTH: Medium
Jones - at that point still in his long approach pattern to life - didn't know a thing about the instrument.
But he was game to try.
``We got it started,'' said Jones, ``but we never got it close to finished.''
No matter. The one time biology major, soldier, pro basketball draftee and video maker had finally found his calling.
Jones was a child of the '60s, the son of a music professor. He had played the violin, been a government-paid advocate for children. He had played basketball in Portugal.
He had raised ducks.
But at an age when many middle-class kids already are taking their first steps up the corporate ladder, Jones was still looking around for a permanent life.
``I don`t think I had a notion what I wanted to do yet,'' Jones said of the time.
Making a hammer dulcimer changed all that.
Jones already knew he liked wood. He had learned that much at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston - where he was a student and where he had done some wood work. Jones eventually earned an MFA degree from the college.
If his first attempt to make a hammer dulcimer was a failure, it had also been a gas, Jones decided. He tried again, alone.
He worked for five months, using wood from an abandoned bed frame.
It stunk.
``It sounded absolutely terrible,'' Jones said.
Chagrined, he took it to a music store, where an expert looked it over.
``He said, `You know, this wouldn't sound half bad if you tuned it up an octave,`` said Jones, laughing at the memory. ``That shows how much I knew.''
Tuned up properly, the instrument sounded just fine. Jones was off and running.
He was also in love - and his wife-to-be, Karen Nuzzo, was sick of Boston and wanted a place in the country. They chose Bedford County
Why Bedford?
``We started throwing darts at the map,'' Jones said. ``How do you end up anywhere?''
In fact, Jones' wife had friends in the area, who found them a farmhouse for $50 a month.
In the beginning Jones worked on the porch - his 6-foot-8 frame crammed under the low roof.
His wife wove rugs. They scraped by, supplementing their sub-minimum wage income with part-time jobs.
``I've always felt that you have to be clear about what you want to do,'' Jones says now of those years when his annual income was $4,000 or $5,000. ``It's very easy to get distracted. There are lots of ways to make more money that might even temporarily hold your interest.''
Thanks to a few favorable reviews in Frets Magazine, Jones' sales eventually took off. He now has a national reputation for his hammer dulcimers, which sell for about $1,300.
These days Jones lives in his own house near Big Island, on a pretty, tree-shaded plot of mountain land. His wife has given up weaving for a time to home school their two children, Goss, 11, and Garret, 7.
Jones, meanwhile, has his own detached shop, complete with air conditioning, an old stereo and wall-to-wall power tools.
In 14 years he has made, by his reckoning, some 560 hammer dulcimers - not to mention countless zithers, thumb pianos, folk harps, Irish bouzoukis, bowed psalteries and wooden slit drums.
He does not make electric instruments, Jones said, because the electronics of such instruments are usually more important than the acoustics.
Nor does he make the classic orchestral instruments - in part, Jones said, because the musicians too often want an instrument made to vague but exacting standards, only to decide in the end it isn`t right for them.
``I don't need it,'' he said of the headache.
So it is with hammer dulcimers, zithers, harps and the rest that the one-time Houston Mavericks third-round draft pick (he never signed; Uncle Sam trumped the now-defunct franchise, it being 1968) finds his happiness, not to mention his living.
Jones said some people have misguided romantic notions about his sweat-soaked life.
It is true he loves his work.
On the other hand...
``The hours are brutal,'' said Jones, 48. ``I work like a dog.''
by CNB