It All Started with a Dream

LINDA'S STORY

In 2007, my husband and I were living in St. Thomas, preparing to move back to the states.

We planned to settle in Franklin, TN, 30 miles south of Nashville, and open a dulcimer store at “The Factory,” a historic building that was once a stove factory but was currently an indoor mall hosting several stores.
We had selected a name for the store - Dulcimer Crossing, bought the domain name, picked a nice space in the mall to locate, paid a deposit to hold it for a couple of months, and started purchasing inventory for the store as well as packing for the move.

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My plan was, when business was slow, to stand in front of our store and play my hammered dulcimer to entice tourists to enter.  Then, they would either fall in love with dulcimers and buy an instrument or at least select a dulcimer CD to take home with them.

I also planned to wall off a space within the store to give dulcimer lessons. But we had a reality check when we started counting the total start-up cost plus living expenses, so we decided to establish an online dulcimer school instead.

Wood-N-Strings Dulcimer Shop in Townsend, TN, kindly bought the t-shirts, Dulcimer Crossing signs, CDs, and instruments that we had already purchased for our own store. And so we began the process of learning how to video-tape lessons and upload them to the web.  After only a few months, we had several students enrolled, but it was a lop-sided effort - offering only hammered dulcimer lessons.

To remedy this, I invited Steve Eulberg to join the business as partner, and add the mountain dulcimer element.  He took the vision far beyond my wildest dreams, and with the help of an additional 15 teachers, we have expanded the school's offerings to include several related instruments.

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STEVE'S STORY

Steve was teaching from his private studio in northern Colorado since 1997, but in 2005 was invited, via email inquiry, to consider teaching guitar lessons online.

Because he really wanted to teach dulcimer lessons this way, he agreed to the conversations with that as a goal.

Meetings were held and a demo class was filmed and everyone agreed to move forward, starting with guitar, and later adding dulcimer. 

The first lessons for JamPlay were filmed in 2006 with Steve as the initial instructor.

As JamPlay continued to gain traction, the staff felt like they needed to keep the focus on guitar so finally conceded that they would be unable to move forward with providing dulcimer lessons.

Saddened, but not dissuaded, he kept trying to find ways to do this when he received the invitation from Linda Ratcliffe (whom he had met years before at a weekend workshop in Houston, TX) to partner with her on the venture of DulcimerCrossing.  "Have you been reading my mind?" is what he thought when her invitation arrived!  

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