Andrew Rowan Summers

Andrew Rowan Summers, born in Virginia, earned a law degree from the University of Virginia yet devoted his leisure hours in the 1940s and 1950s to music. Drawn to the origins of Appalachian songs, he became a dedicated collector who sought out elderly traditional singers and worked to safeguard the earliest versions of their material along with period-authentic instruments. At the White Top Folk Festival he encountered the plucked mountain dulcimer—distinct from its hammered counterpart—performed by a frail octogenarian too weak to join the scheduled events. Summers befriended the player, who two years afterward bequeathed the instrument to him upon his death. Summers then cultivated the older, pre-revival classical technique he had observed, deliberately avoiding the simplified popular methods that emerged during the folk movements of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1946 he joined a Columbia University program curated by Alan Lomax at New York’s McMillan Theater, appearing alongside Texas Gladden, Hobart Smith, and Jean Ritchie. His earliest recording, the Columbia album Old World Ballads in America, appeared in 1940; eleven years later he began a sustained partnership with Folkways Records that encompassed both traditional repertoire and seasonal music. The Folkways debut Unquiet Grave (1951) was succeeded by Seeds of Love, followed in turn by Lady Gay, Christmas Carols, and the 1957 collection titled Andrew Rowan Summers. Together with Mellinger Henry, Maurice Matteson, and John Jacob Niles, he helped bring the mountain dulcimer to wider audiences during the 1950s and early 1960s through these discs and his concert appearances.