The sounds of the season are beautifully struck as a wispy choral of notes float across the strings of Ted Yoder’s hammered dulcimer.
“It just always felt like this was the instrument I was supposed to play,” says Yoder from his home tucked among the farm fields of Goshen, Indiana.
The hammered dulcimer has roots in the folk music of Appalachia, but can be found in a multitude of other nations and iterations.
“It’s used in folk music at best, but typically it’s heard more in mountain music,” says Yoder.
The stringed instrument with its spoon-like hammers has been a part of Ted’s life for more than two decades.
“I play guitar and I play piano, but I just wasn’t drawn to them like the hammered dulcimer,” says Yoder. “There’s just a magic about the instrument and there’s a magic to the sound.”
Lately, he’s been sharing that magic with audiences via social media from his home orchard.
“When I’m going live in the orchard at any point in time, you know, a tractor will go by, a manure spreader or something is happening in the background because of the farmers next door,” says Yoder.
It was that setting in 2016 that pushed Yoder into viral video stardom.
“So the first week I went live, I had like seven viewers I think, and a total of forty-seven views by the by the weekend,” remembers Yoder.
The next week he took a different approach.
“I decided to play a rendition of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears,” says Yoder. “By Sunday I had 54 million views.”
Today that same video has more than 100 million views.
“So that’s what I’m most famous for,” laughs Yoder.
As likely the world’s most famous hammered dulcimer player, he continues to thrill his audiences online and draw inspiration from the fields around him. Capturing little moments that percolate through his newly released winter album and a song called “The Perfect Snow.”
“I was sitting up in my office last November and it was starting to snow, right around Thanksgiving, like it kind of does in Indiana and it was just that, perfect falling snow,” remembers the inspired Yoder.
He wrote a song about it and it’s now included in his latest album “Shadowlight,” a collection of winter and Christmas songs.
This season, while he doesn’t have a spotlight, he does have a way to share his passion across the web of wires and wireless connections online.
“We just you just don’t have a stage anymore right now and I don’t know when it’s coming back,” says Yoder.
Yoder continues to play this interesting instrument from the edges of farm fields of Indiana where he can strike at the heart of the Christmas season and beyond.
“It’s in my blood,” says Yoder. “It’s so unique and I just can’t imagine playing anything else.”
Watch the entire “Christmas in the Country” episode at www.agday.com on December 25, 2020 or on US Farm Report over the weekend.
