Carol Walker
Originally from Colorado, Carol has lived in the Northeast since 1963. Her formal training includes a degree in Music Education, with majors in piano, harp, and voice. She was an active high school choral director in northern NJ for 32 years, and in 2003 was a recipient of the NJ Governor’s Teacher of the Year Award. She continues to freelance as a classical piano accompanist and musical theater director.
In 2008 she retired from her school job and moved on to her next adventure: Getting better acquainted with her Appalachian mountain dulcimer, which she had purchased in 1999. This newly found avenue of folk music led her to connect with many other folk musicians, along with an invitation to join Wayfarers & Company, an eclectic old-time folk group based in Stroudsburg, PA. Carol was active with this group for over 15 years, adding vocal harmonies and playing dulcimer, upright bass, piano, melodica, and harp. The Wayfarers have produced two CDs.
She began teaching dulcimer workshops in at the Pocono Winter DulcimerFest in 2006 and soon became a popular workshop leader at festivals all across the United States.
In 2014 and 2016, Carol entered the National Mountain Dulcimer Contest in Winfield, Kansas, both times placing as one of the Top Five Finalists.
Carol is well known for her successful books of arrangements for mountain dulcimer. Seven different titles are in use throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia. Her first two books (Tailless Tunes and Tailless Tunes 2) contain dozens of traditional Manx melodies. Her arrangements of these unfamiliar Celtic-flavored tunes from the Isle of Man have been enthusiastically welcomed on this side of the Atlantic.
Two CDs of Manx music (Alas! The Horse is Gone and Tailless Tunes 2) were also released in conjunction with the books, featuring Carol performing on dulcimer, harp, piano, melodica. and upright bass, accompanied by other professional musicians playing Celtic fiddle, guitar, whistle, and bodhran.
Next, she published a trilogy of sequential instructional books (DNA* Dulcimer Ditties), designed to guide dulcimer students from their very first simple tunes all the way up to advanced show-stoppers. (*Songs so familiar they’re practically etched on your DNA)
In 2015, Carol released her first instructional DVD (Exploring the Beauty of the Appalachian Dulcimer), produced by Happy Traum of Homespun Tapes, in Woodstock, NY.
Her long-awaited book of classical arrangements appeared in 2017: Classical Dulcimer for Wascally Wabbits, in which dulcimer players discover that they are already familiar with the best classical melodies, thanks to Bugs Bunny cartoons, and that these arrangements, taken from full orchestral scores, are actually playable on a three-string diatonically-fretted mountain dulcimer!
And in October of 2019, she celebrated the official release of her seventh dulcimer tab book: Church in the Wildwood, a collection of 40 favorite hymns and spirituals arranged as solos and/or for dulcimer ensembles of all levels. She even made a special trip to Nashua, Iowa, home of the actual Little Brown Church, where she took photographs for the new book, and also made a video of herself, sitting on the altar, playing the title tune on her dulcimer.