by Peter Berryman
Joel Mabus, great Michigan folk musician and songwriter, emailed recently to say that he had just rented a DVD of The Third Man, the famed 1949 movie starring Joseph Cotton. The disc included archival performance footage of soundtrack composer Anton Karas, whose zithered theme song was on the Top 40 for three weeks in 1950. Joel says:
All the melody notes were played with a thumb pick, while his right hand fingers reached out and played the bass notes. Left hand fretting like a lap dulcimer with frets on steroids -- high notes fretted with the side of the thumb.
The self-taught Karas (1906-1985) had been discovered playing zither in a bar in Austria by the director. Karas used the money he eventually made from the theme song to buy a different bar in Austria which he called The Third Man. A collection of his work, released in 2000, is called Hither 'N' Zither (!)
The fretting Joel mentions indicates that Karas played a concert zither, one of two main zither categories, the other of which is the fretless zither. In a fretted instrument, you change pitch by mashing at least some of the strings down upon a fretboard, as in a guitar. In an unfretted instrument, you don't change the pitch of any strings, but find the note you want by playing a different string entirely. There are many ways of doing this, including plucking individual strings, as with a harp; damping strings you don't want heard, as with an autoharp; and hitting strings with a striker directly, as with a hammered dulcimer, or indirectly via a keyboard-actuated hammer, as with a piano or a Dolceola. More on the latter in a sec.
I wrote back to Joel saying that my favorite zither music was on a Leadbelly LP called Grasshoppers in my Pillow, which I had in the 60s but have misplaced along with my brain since then. On that LP, a zitherist played astounding bluesy backup to Leadbelly's 12-string guitar. Before reading the notes, I thought Leadbelly had transcended human ability and become a guitar angel monster with nine fingers on each hand, so seamlessly did the zitherist blend his accompaniment.
Joel didn't have this recording but mentioned it to a traditional music mailing list on the 'net. Elaboration came from another outstanding musician, the tireless traditional musician, singer, and historian Andy Cohen of Memphis. Turns out that the zither on the Leadbelly LP was a keyboard actuated hammer version of a fretless zither, the Dolceola, and was played by Paul Mason Howard. Andy himself plays one, and has released a sensational CD, which I own and love, called Dolceola Favorites. The first time I saw Andy play this gizmo was in the lobby of a Toronto hotel; it looked like an accordion mating with an autoharp, but sounded to me almost like a harpsichord. As proof that Howard was definitely playing this instrument, Andy says he has seen a photograph of the man sitting next to Leadbelly, and on his lap is indeed the Dolceola.
Incidentally, Howard was also a composer, who co-wrote Shrimp Boats, the 1951 hit for Jo Stafford and also for Dinah Shore, plus a Frankie Laine hit called The Gandy Dancers Ball, and a few songs -- like I'm Davy Crockett's Friend -- with Buddy Ebsen, Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies. (Ebsen was complex, with his med school start, his folk paintings, his dancing career, his sailing trophies, and his love of the Dadaists, about whom he wrote a musical, Cabaret Dada.)
Anyhoo, the Dolceola (literally sweet ola, as Beloit means beautiful oit) was invented in Toledo by brothers David and Leander Boyd. On the US Patent Office website, you can have a look at their patent #719,641 of February 3, 1903, for the Dolceola's hammer mechanism, and read how it works in detail.
Andy tells me the name is pronounced Dol-see-OH-la,
and not Dol-chee (or chey)-oh-la, as I had wondered. The thing
was advertised as a miniature grand piano, and has a hammer action
simpler but similar to that of a piano, allowing a tone to be
sustained by holding down its key. Measuring 24 by 18 inches,
the Dolceola weighs about twenty pounds. A number of photographs
of Dolceolae (Dolceolas?) are to be found on the web (See the
fantastic Dolceola Pages site, listed at end).
I asked Andy about the tuning:
I (actually David Rice) rearranged the chords on the
Dolceola to approximate an accordion... I arranged the chords
in a circle of fifths, such that IV is on the right and V is on
the left of the tonic...
It IS interesting how closely the fingering of Andy's Dolceola resembles an accordion. As with the squeezebox, the right hand uses a piano-like keyboard for the melody, and the left hand uses ivories some of which represent single notes and some of which represent chords. Specifically, for each key, there are three ivories (I use the word ivory for the thing you push down, instead of key, which has too many meanings here). The leftmost ivory is the third of the scale, the middle ivory is the tonic, and the rightmost ivory strikes three strings, sounding the major chord of that key. Since there exist seven tones in western music, there are seven groups of three such ivories, each group representing one key. Each group is situated with its dominant (V) group on one side and its subdominant (IV) on the other, as in an unraveled circle of fifths, same as an accordion's buttons. For a further discussion of this arrangement, see Whither Zither for July 2001, regrding the accordion's buttons.
The Dolceola is one of many zitheroids such as the Cecilian, Harmolin, Harpanola, Hawaiolin, Marxochime, Orchestrola, and Ukelin. How neat that the title of this column is taking me down their strange stringy roads. Had I named it Whither Dinghy, I'd be halfway to Hawaii by now, right behind Paul Mason Howard in a Shrimp Boat.
HUGE thanks to Joel Mabus and Andy Cohen (URLs below) for their OVERLY generous help with this episode.
Webliography:
Joel Mabus:
www.joelmabus.com/
Andy Cohen:
www.andycohenmusic.com
or www.riverlark.com/
The Dolceola Pages (includes mp3s)
home.earthlink.net/~minermusic/dolceola.htm
US Patent Office:
www.uspto.gov/
Anton Karas recordings:
http://www.amazon.com (do
a search for Anton Karas with Amazon's search feature)
Paul Mason Howard bio: Big Bands Database Plus:
nfo.net/cal/th11.html (scroll
down)