Museum Talk

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

In the music area of the Buffalo Island Museum is an instrument that you don't see very often. It is an Oscar Schmidt autoharp. The autoharp is a chorded zither. It is a musical stringed instrument with a wooden body having a series of chord bars attached to a damper. When a bar is depressed, it meets all of the strings other than those that form the desired chord. There are usually thirty-six or thirty-seven strings. Autoharps are mostly used for bluegrass and country music. Some of the more famous people who played the autoharp are June and Maybelle Carter, John Mellencamp, Janis Joplin, and Led Zeppelin.

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