The Appalachian dulcimer, nicknamed the hog fiddle, is central to a Scotch-Irish mountain tradition, yet it has no precedent in Ireland, Scotland, or northern England. This episode traces its ancestry to European box zithers such as the Swedish hummel, Norwegian langeleik, German scheitholt, and French epinette des Vosges, carried into the mountains through German settlement in Pennsylvania. West Virginia luthier Charles Maxson's theory explains why frontier settlers built a flat "raft" of a box instead of the high-tension "suspension bridge" of a violin.

The hosts break down the instrument's construction, diatonic fretting, noter-and-drone playing with a bamboo dowel and feather quill, and why laying it on a kitchen table turns the table into a second soundboard. They follow it from J. Edward Thomas's Kentucky workshop and a 1917 Vogue app ...