'I've endured.' Eastern Kentucky musicians rebuild after the floods with hope and resilience

Damaged instruments from the Museum of the 
Mountain Dulcimer (Photo by Stephanie Wolf, WFPL)

Decimated by the 2022 flooding, Eastern Kentucky's music community is finding ways to rebuild all that was lost: "The water carried away dozens of historic instruments, including early examples of the hourglass-shaped dulcimer, developed and honed in Knott and Letcher counties in southeast Kentucky, and one once played by Appalachian music legend Jean Ritchie," reports Stephanie Wolf of Louisville's WFPL, discussing the losses at the Museum of the Mountain Dulcimer in Hindman. "About two-thirds of the collection 'just disappeared.' What was recovered will need extensive restoration."

Doug Naselroad, co-curator of the museum, told Wolf that it was difficult for him to dig up the courage to visit after the flood. When he finally did get up the nerve, he felt "like you're Indiana Jones exploring his own tomb. You have trepidation and dread looking in at the things you cherish and trying to will them back."

Eastern Kentuckians are familiar with flooding, Wolf writes, "but there's a distressing redundancy in the responses I heard when asking people about this particular weather event, which swept through Central Appalachia but did the most concentrated damage here, in the southeast part of the state."

Sarah Kate Morgan at Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, where she serves as director of traditional arts education, told Wolf, "For the next year, we're going to be focused on rebuilding what we lost instead of reaching out, like we usually do. We won't be able to do as much of the good work that we used to . . . and I fear that we'll lose some momentum."

Toward the end of their interview, Wolf shares, "Morgan fetched her own mountain dulcimer from her on-site apartment, saying, 'It'd be nice to play music for a second,' Her brief set included a subdued rendition of Ernie Carpenter's Elk River Blues and Ola Belle Reed's 'I've Endured'. When I thanked her for the performance, she answered as though I'd done her a favor: 'It was good for me to share.'"

Wolf continues, "Naselroad and his team have begun the long process to restore both the luthiery and the factory, and he hopes to be building instruments again in an alternate facility before the end of the year. As for the museum and its recovered instruments, their story just got bigger: not merely artifacts of the builders and musicians who brought them to life, but now, witnesses to a historic crisis, and participants in the collective recovery."

"The things that can be restored, that can be repaired, that survived? I think it's a powerful statement," Naselroad told Wolf. "Our heritage can't be destroyed."