30th Year Photos/#11

Alisa Jones Walls
In 1982, after meeting in Mt. View, Arkansas at the Southern Regional Dulcimer Festival and goofing around on several dulcimers, she asked me to produce a small light instrument for her to play.  I was so honored to have Grandpa Jones’ daughter play one of my instruments, especially since I had been building only a few years.  The Jones’ were such an important foundational cornerstone of Mt. View.  She was so gorgeous and her voice and talent was even more magnificent.  I was on cloud nine.  But the best was yet to come.  She married a wonderful young man by the name of Ron Walls who most folks in the folk music world know as one of the finest autoharp players in the world!  A few years later they moved to Nashville and started their own label “Cumberland Music”.  Not thousands, nor tens of thousands, nor even hundreds of thousands but a million and more albums later, with the dulcimer I built for her (still the instrument she uses) as the instrument she performed on and the primary instrument on the recordings, I still consider her accomplishments and music on one of my dulcimers one of the highlights of my coincidental career. This photo is of one of her album covers.