Social-impact Luthiery

More than 150 years ago, in the heart of Appalachia, James Edward Thomas, known as Uncle Ed, loaded up a handcart and pushed it along the banks of Troublesome Creek, selling his handmade mountain dulcimers in Hindman, Kentucky.

Today, at Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Co., the making of these same dulcimers, as  well as guitars, mandolins and banjolynns, have helped dozens of people recover from substance abuse addiction and find fulfillment as luthiers and musicians.

“There are a lot of dulcimer makers who have been connected to this place,” says Doug Naselroad, luthier and founder of Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Co. “So it’s sort of like a firmly rooted tree right here in Hindman – the music, the instruments and the people keep coming back.”

The Origins of Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Co.

Nearly 15 years ago, in an effort to further revive Hindman’s luthiery roots, the Appalachian Artisan Center invited Naselroad to come to Hindman to start a school of luthiery.

Naselroad has been playing and making guitars since 1969. He was mentored by Homer Ledford (a neighbor and encourager). In 1979, he opened his own shop in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. He worked for Collings Guitars in Austin in the 1990s. He’s taken notes from many instrument makers he’s met along his life’s path, and he’s built many instruments, including guitars, mandolins, harps and dulcimers, for well-known musicians, including John Prine, Lyle Lovett and Steve Miller.

In 2012, Naselroad founded the Appalachian School of Luthiery. Once fully embedded in the community, Naselroad was struck by the number of people affected by the opioid epidemic, and wanted to help. Around 2016, he and a former colleague began to formalize a plan, leading to their founding of the Culture of Recovery in 2020 – an apprenticeship program for folks recovering from substance abuse disorders.

“It was very organic,” Naselroad says. “It grew up out of the need of the place, the resources that were available and the community that started to grow there. I really feel like it’s a mission. To put it plainly, I just think it’s what God put me down here to do.”

At first, the idea was simple: Teach people how to make instruments in order to learn a craft that will enrich their lives.

That idea became a lifeline for many and led to the founding of Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Co., a nonprofit formed in partnership with the Appalachian School of Luthiery, providing jobs and helping with recovery.

“I realized that it was a critical part of their recovery to learn a skill and develop a career that they could fix their hopes on,” Naselroad says.

A New Way Forward

In September 2020, Anthony Parsons, then 22, entered rehab at Hickory Hill Recovery Center.

“I was at the death of my addiction,” Parsons says.

Through Hickory Hill, he entered the Culture of Recovery program, and once a week, he would come to Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Co. and learn how to build guitars. Parsons has played guitar since he was 12, but had no woodworking experience.

“When I got here, it was just like, oh man, this is exactly where I’m supposed to be,” Parsons says. “And they were nice enough to give me the opportunity to continue doing that. They hired me when I was just getting done with rehab, and I’ve worked here ever since.”

It took Parsons about a year to get the hang of the neck-making process.

“You’re learning something for the first time, and maybe you don’t have a lot of experience in it,” Parsons says. “It takes determination to get past your initial frustrations because not everything comes naturally to everybody, and that’s OK. But I think when you push past that aspect of it, that’s where you grow.”

Today, Parsons mainly builds guitars and banjolynns, but he has a hand in most of the instruments, and is usually the last person to touch them before they go out the door.

“I make sure they play really nice and that they sound good and everything’s working,” Parsons says.

Much of his work is by hand, with fine attention to detail.

“It’s kind of an art form in a way,” Parsons says. “We have a few templates and stuff, but really, it’s by feel. You kind of close your eyes and you feel the neck in front of you and you feel for lopsidedness or anything like that. And you just spend time with sandpaper and files and you make sure that it’s as good as it can be. And I think that process in particular can be really soothing. It helps take away some worries from time to time if you can just get in the zone and work on it.”

Parsons, who enjoys everything from Tony Rice and Doc Watson to slam metal, plays nearly all the instruments thoroughly, before they go out the door.

Currently, he’s going to school to earn his drug counseling license.

“I hope, and who knows if this could ever happen, but I hope to be able to do some of that here rather than have to leave – be able to kind of help out here and maybe work that into my position and help counsel the guys as I can,” he says.

Naselroad says watching people enter the Culture of Recovery straight out of rehab – raw and often lacking confidence – and witnessing them become accomplished woodworkers is an amazing experience.

Woodworking is Magic

Lessons begin with entry-level instruments.

“We have a little ukulele that’s made kind of like a wishbone,” Naselroad says. “We have a guitar and a banjolynn that are basic wooden instruments. And then, as soon as people are interested, we make the traditional mountain dulcimer of Knott County, Kentucky.”

Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Co.’s catalog is structured, but not restrictive.

“We use traditional violin-making tools for the mandolins,” Naselroad says. “There’s a lot of hand carving that goes on with drawknives and spokeshaves. At some point, we do end up using abrasive planers and power tools in a modern workshop.”

Instruments are often made from Appalachian hardwood.

“It’s been a wonderful ongoing experiment,” Naselroad says. “The woodworking part has just been a joy because we get to find out what instruments made of hackberry, Osage orange and persimmon sound like – all these instruments that you never see in the industry because we have all these Appalachian hardwoods, and we can try them and fine-tune the process. We’ve got some real outstanding results that way.”

This, Naselroad says, has been driven by his people.

“My guys just love to build from things that are from this place,” Naselroad says. “They have a real sense of place. One guy came in one time, and he said, ‘I got some big, wide, tulip poplar shelf boards from my wife’s grandfather’s general store. They were the produce shelves at the C.B. Caudill Store. I’ve got to see if I can make a guitar out of it. Will that work?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure. Let’s see what it does.’ If it’s stable, it’s crack-free and it’s quartersawn, we can generally make a functional instrument – and sometimes a really excellent instrument.”

Fine woodworking, Naselroad says, can be a magical experience.

“Instrument making, for me, is the best example of fine woodworking because it’s like this tremendous magic trick,” Naselroad says. “You take a muddy old log from the woods, and you process it, and you cut it just so, and you dry it and you build this thing at the end of which you have music. It’s like a magic trick. And that to me is the most functional kind of woodworking.”

And when people become enthralled by this magic trick and challenged by this labor-intensive work, their attention refocuses on something other than obtaining drugs, Naselroad says.

“The gratification, the endorphin rush that comes from drug abuse, is replaced by something that doesn’t punish you, something that you can actually get a reward out of and not be given time by the courts,” Naselroad says. “You’ve got a positive goal, an obsession, if you will, to replace the one. It actually rewires the chemistry of the brain of the addict.”

Jeremy Haney has been with Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Co. since October, 2019. Like Parsons, he was introduced to the Culture of Recovery program through Hickory Hill Recovery Center.

“I came down and started learning how to build instruments,” Haney says. “And from there, it’s just been one step after another, gaining knowledge and experience. And later on, I gained a job here at Troublesome Creek Instrument Co.”

Woodworking came naturally to Haney, in part because he’s always been artistic.

“I think that helped a lot with the learning process,” he says. “But I did have my challenges. It was a big learning curve, learning the process, the steps and having my eyes opened up – the details that I would’ve never had them opened up to. Learning how to build these instruments, you have to look at fine detail, and that’s just something I wasn’t used to doing. So that was a big learning curve for me.”

Having something to put his mind and hands into helped ground him, Haney says.

“This kind of work is therapeutic,” he says.  “So that was a big help for me, from my recovery standpoint. I think they go hand-in-hand and one really supports the other.”

Today, Haney solely builds mandolins and is considered one of the country’s leading mandolin makers, Naselroad says. Each mandolin takes him one to two weeks to build.

“It’s a mixture of power tools, hand tools and sandpaper – a lot of sandpaper,” Haney says. “I try to be as flawless as I can.”

Haney loves the work.

“I kind of just naturally took to it, and it’s something that I’ve learned that I’m actually good at,” Haney says. “So not only is it rewarding in the sense that it’s therapeutic, it’s also rewarding in the sense that at the end of the build, I get to hear this instrument being played. And getting feedback from the people that buy these instruments, saying how much they love them and how good they sound, it’s pretty rewarding all the way around in that aspect.”

One of Haney’s instruments was purchased by an organization that donated it to Ricky Skaggs.

“Knowing Ricky Scaggs has one of my instruments is probably one of the highlights of my career,” Haney says. “Hopefully, I have a lot more moments like that in my future. But right now, that’s good enough for me. Never in a million years did I think I’d be building instruments, let alone having somebody like Richard Skaggs own one.”

Haney hopes to one day have his own shop and brand.

Community & Music

Community is a core component of recovery.

“We eat together, we work together, we design our stuff together,” Naselroad says.

With shared goals, there’s a shared sense of purpose.

“It’s like one big meeting, all the time,” Haney says. “Talking about your problems in recovery is a big thing. It’s something that’s vital in recovery. You need to talk it out and get other perspectives on what you’re going through, because being in it firsthand, you really can’t see the problem or the solution. Having somebody’s opinion or somebody’s perspective from the outside may give you a better perspective of what you need to do or how you need to handle it.”

With so many fellow colleagues in recovery, Parsons says he always has someone, which has helped him stay clean and sober.

Music is key to the recovery process, too.

“I just left the factory a few minutes ago, and one of our newest employees was sitting with our shop foreman, and they were having something like a guitar lesson over there after work,” Naselroad says. “My crew is full of musicians and songwriters,” Naselroad says. “They write as part of their recovery. In the 12-step program, journaling your feelings and your experience is a means by which you get a handle on a lot of things. And a lot of them like to journal about their upbringing, their addiction and their recovery. We take the instruments that we make and we do radio shows and festivals – all kinds of opportunities for them to express themselves.”

For Parsons, it’s the process that matters.

“Having a hand in this process, where you start with something that’s just a tree, and you end up with this really fine instrument, that’s beautiful,” Parsons says. “You have this guitar or mandolin or dulcimer or whatever it may be in your hand and you can strum it, Parsons says. “And it has this really beautiful sound and then you get to see where all your hard work and dedication has come out on the other side and you have a finished product. I think recovery is very similar. If you work to mold yourself into the person you want to be, and you put in all the work, and there’s other people that help you too along the way, just like the instruments, I think you also get a really beautiful and wonderful product at the end. But it requires work and dedication, just like the luthiery does.”

The Flood

In July 2022, after 10 years of laying the groundwork for the factory, it was gone – all of it.

“On the day of the flood, we pretty much thought that we’d all lost everything and one another,” Naselroad says.

The night of the flood, Parsons woke up to constant emergency alerts on his phone, telling him to seek higher ground and to seek shelter.

“It was scary,” Parsons says. “Luckily, where I live in particular, I didn’t have to worry too much, but I had no idea what was going on. That morning, I had every intention of going to work, but there was mudslides at the end of my road and I couldn’t. So then I started trying to call and text people and nobody really knew what was going on. Nobody could get to the factory. And then I finally got a hold of somebody and they were just like, well, everything’s gone.”

It was difficult, but no one wallowed in it, says Naselroad, who called his crew and said, “You guys were skilled luthiers yesterday. Today, you are disaster recovery workers, so pick up your shovels.”

Everyone dug in and went to work.

“There was mud and dirt and grime everywhere,” Parsons says. “Wood had been washed down the creek. There was a bunch in the facility still, but it was all water-damaged and dirty. All our tools were in the mud. At the time, I didn’t know what was going to happen because this is still my livelihood. This is what I do to make money. So I was pretty worried about that, but we’ve really bounced back from it. Luckily, we’ve had a lot of supporters along the way. A lot of people have helped us rebuild.”

They lost five buildings, including their factory, which took three years and millions of dollars to restore. Throughout it all, Naselroad managed to keep everyone on the clock full-time, paid.

“You would be amazed at how strong and capable and dedicated my crew was in the midst of this disaster,” Naselroad says. “When we finally got back, the guys felt like they were back home again,” Naselroad says. “The flood, while it shook my confidence in the creek – I don’t trust the creek like I used to – it really affirmed my faith in the community, not only my guys, but the church community, Eastern Kentucky, and a lot of nonprofits and artists who stepped up.”

This included famous musicians, such as Chris Stapleton and Tyler Childers.

“Without them, we wouldn’t have made it through that first winter,” Naselroad says.

A Promising Future

Troublesome Creek Instrument Co. has produced about 400 instruments since its founding, despite the flood and the pandemic. Prices range from $525 for a dulcimer to $6,000 or more for a high-end guitar.

“Social-impact luthiery is an idea that never occurred to me until I was doing it,” Naselroad says. “But it’s a community that I’ve been privileged to serve and it’s been a wonderful, wonderful time. I really think that it’s a string of miracles that have put us where we are today, the flood included. We lost everything and then had everything put back in a really spectacular way. There’s a community strength that’s there that goes beyond just our shared interest of luthiery. A lot of life and death stuff has happened in the past four or five years.”

If you can use woodworking to give people the gift of a better life, then you are fortunate, Naselroad says.

“I’m very fortunate to have that opportunity.”

— Kara Gebhart Uhl