Artist Profile - Connie Allen by
Able
to leap tall instruments in a single bound! Look, up on the mast! It’s a bird! It’s a’playin’! It’s Amazing Connie Allen, otherwise known in these parts as Connie Dulcimerseed. Many fanciful characters come to mind as one gets to know Connie, even Tinkerbell by her ability to change musical and life directions in a flash and with grace, always with her trusty dulcimer family at her side.
Unlike Superman, she does not apprehend the bad, but brings out the good in people who interact with her musically. She’s always willing to give lessons to the hungry, and runs the “Flustered Fretters” dulcimer practice group biweekly at her home. Her ability to let each seed grow in its own way is readily apparent when you watch her in action there on Thursday nights—there couldn’t be a more nurturing attitude. Some folks in the group just chord, others play only melody string, others chords and melody. Some folks read the music that initially she provided, but now many contribute to (thanks to TabEdit), while others play by ear. Some folks like it hot and fast, some folks like it slow and melodic. There is Connie just flowing with it, playing firmly, keeping everyone together, and when it’s flowing on its own, she’ll move off to improvise and accent the musical unit. Next thing you know someone else is following suit, trying to push their envelope a bit. There is no genre of music that is forbidden at this gathering and everyone is welcome. This club has been meeting now for 6 years.
Connie
grew up in a house with the ubiquitous piano. Music was also provided by records, tapes, her singing mom, as well as by her dad, Johnnie Allen, who in midlife decided engineering was not enough and bought himself a bass. He became a frequent band member and her role model. Johnnie can still be heard playing in a swing band in the nearby senior citizen facility he calls home and Connie sometimes joins him for performances there. At eight years of age Connie was allowed to start taking piano lessons like her brother and found an immediate knack for memorizing the music. While she continued studying piano until she was seventeen and tried violin in school, it was the
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Judi Ganchrow
dulcimer and guitar that began to speak to her, especially through recordings she heard of Richard Fariña. She thought the dulcimer was the most advantageous for she might quickly become the best player in New Hampshire with not much competition. At age fourteen she set about building her first four-string dulcimer (from a kit) and the glue had hardly dried when she took it to her first performance with Mary Hostage. The next year she set out to build one of two more dulcimers she constructed, this time from scratch with the help of Howie Mitchell’s book. While she got the hang of setting the frets, she discovered her fingers were in jeopardy of the power tools and decided her place in music was probably going to be in performance and composition, not in building. The first songs she wrote during high school caught the spirit of the times with often politically strident lyrics. After years of donning a business suit as a computer programmer and business analyst, she rediscovered contradancing and attended the 1994 Summer Solstice where a three-string McSpadden dulcimer fell in her lap. She began to explore the voices, string and fret variations, and tonal ranges of different dulcimer designers, gradually acquiring her dulcimer menagerie. In 1995 she began playing for contradances on a regular basis with the Continental Drifters string band, contributing her musical energy on both bass and dulcimer. Two CDs and a music book entitled The More the Merrier evolved and from this musical bond that spanned a ten-year period. This CD pair showcased the band playing original old timey tunes written by bandleader and seasoned fiddler, Ed Cormier. Wooden buildings marking the beginning of San Diego are preserved in a park near downtown. Starting in 2004 and continuing for about two years, Connie donned elegant hats and garb from the turn of the century to play dulcimer and sing about the history of San Diego: An actual six-hour/day solo music gig! In this context she became more and more
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