Hammering Out a Tune

When Bill Robinson hears a song, he can play it back from memory. And his choice to hammer out that song isn't the typical string instrument.

Robinson is a teacher of various musical instruments—"anything with strings" as he puts it—and does so out of his home located just north of the city of St. Charles.

On Sunday afternoon, Robinson set up a shop at the Fox Valley Folk Music and Storytelling Festival in Geneva with a booth full of hammered dulcimers, a stringed flat wood instrument that is struck with hammers to plays notes, with several of his students.

"It seems like the dulcimer gets more popularity than anything else," said Robinson, as he paused in between a lesson he gave to one student and demonstrations to passersby.

At any given time, Robinson keeps about 20 students, many who come great distances and even from other states for a lesson in the dulcimer from him.

One student, eight-year-old Lizzie Egerman of Sycamore started up in May after falling in love with the instrument.

"She's a sponge," said Robinson of Egerman.

Alison Coyer, 17, from Harding, IL, started on the dulcimer about five years ago when her aunt took her to an event, called a "sampler," where multiple musical instruments can be tried. She actually had started on the mountain dulcimer, a variant of the instrument she would later come to love.

"My teacher (at the time) let me try her hammered dulcimer and I was, like, "I want one."

The draw for Coyer, who placed third in a national competition last year, is the unique sound that the dulcimer makes. To an untrained ear, it sounds vaguely like a cross between a harp and a xylophone.

"It's not something everyone has heard of," she said.

Since he was five years old, Robinson has played musical instruments not by reading the music but by playing from ear, said his wife, Ann Robinson. The couple has been married for more than 40 years and she, about 14 years ago, started playing the bass fiddle and the hammered dulcimer. Ann also taught for a while.

"He does not read music," she said. "He teaches by ear."

Bill also has written a book of music, although, according to his wife, it's not exactly a formal process. She said he understands the patterns to playing each stringed instrument.

"They just come out of him. He doesn't write them down," Ann said.

Bill Robinson can be reached at 630-377-0519.