Larkin

Larkin Bryant, Okie from Muskogee, moved with her family to Whitehaven in the mid-fifties. She got involved with folk music early on and worked her way back from the more popular stuff to the source music. She founded Riverlark Music in 1984, coinciding with the publication of Larkin’s Dulcimer Book. It was hardly her first enterprise but was one of the most productive and the longest lasting. 

A child of her times, she could jitterbug with the best of them, had a party box of 45’s including some Elvis ones, even had a couple of Elvis 78s! She fell into folk music along with much of the rest of her generation, waitressing and performing at John McIntyre’s Bitter Lemon coffeehouse starting about 1962. She performed, organized, recorded, taught and published traditional material from her first days until her last days, a career lasting sixty years. Her influence was felt in small and large ways at a very basic level, where the work gets done. She never sought fame; rather, she earned the respect of those whom she taught and performed for. And she did all this mostly from within a few miles of home.

Maybe Jean Ritchie did more to establish the Appalachian Dulcimer in the canon of American Folk Music, but Larkin Bryant spent her life doing the grunt work that made the instrument come alive in the hands of players at all skill levels.

She took the instrument up at the Ozark Folk Center and after honing her technique for a few years she taught it in person. Through her instructional, Larkin’s Dulcimer Book, she created a new thing, a programmed text, graded from beginning to end, with its own cassette (remember those?) to tune to and play along with. Her own first performance project from back in the cassette days was called Deep Like a River, and caused quite a stir in the Dulcimer universe of the day.

She started but was not able to finish half a dozen projects that her husband hopes to finish at length. She left an entire roomful of tabs, in folders and notebooks, boxes and lying loose. In her sixties she fell in love with Irish fiddle tunes, playing in a Ceilidh band for ten years until she passed. She would collect the tunes off The Session website, assemble them into notebooks and play through them for hours. In all that time she also cared for about forty cats and several dogs, all of them rescues or strays.

She toured, she taught, she accumulated a minutely gradated set of tunes she taught from that became Larkin’s Dulcimer Book. She counted the money from a thousand Bingo games that bought the first transmitter for Memphis’s community radio station, WEVL. She organized concerts for all manner of folk players in Memphis for years before she organized the Memphis Dulcimer Festival which went on for roughly twenty years.

She wrote out music for Lessons and Carols for four different churches over half a dozen years, trios to nonettes, all the parts handwritten with a nib pen. She was the Celtic Service music minister at Memphis’s Church of the Holy Communion from 2005 until her death from Glioblastoma in 2021.