Fiddle
Guitar

Banjo
Mandolin

Ukulele
Cuatro

Appalachian Dulcimer
Button Accordion

Concertina
Dumbec

Fiddle is an old nickname for the violin: It's also used as a technical term to classify the incredible variety of different bowed-string instruments found around the globe. The concept of bowing lute-type string instruments originated in Central Asia sometime in the 9th century of the Common Era (CE) and spread to China, the Islamic nations and the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. Bowed-string instruments were introduced into Europe via Islamic Spain and Byzantium in the 11th century. Originally, "fiddle" was a catchall name for the various European bowed-strings instruments that came before the violin, which was born in Northern Italy around 1520. In its early years, the violin was not considered a high-class instrument; it was played mostly by professional musicians to accompany popular social dancing, community celebrations and street processions. Upper-crust musical snobs turned their noses up at the violin and wrote it off as a "fiddle," after its out-of-fashion ancestors. The "common folks," however, took the scrappy little "fiddle" to their hearts. By the early 1600s, the violin, in it's role as the fiddle, became the favored instrument for accompanying the "pop" dances and songs of the day all throughout Europe. It wasn't long before the violin made it's way to Europe's colonies and trading partners the world over. In the Americas and the Caribbean of the Colonial Era, it was not only the principal string instrument for the European colonists but also for the native peoples and African slaves, who had adopted the fiddle and made it a vital part of their own musical cultures. Over the centuries, distinctive regional and ethnic traditions of fiddle playing emerged all over the globe. Today, the fiddle is still considered the "King of String Instruments" in many of the different folk and popular music traditions found around the world-- especially throughout Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean.

It's thought that the ancestors of the European guitar were the kaitara, a North African lute-type instrument introduced into Spain by the Moors in the 10th century, and the Persian rubab and the Byzantine cythara, the forbearers of early Western European instruments that are related to the guitar: the citole, cittern, gittern and vihuela. The guitar itself first emerged in Europe in the 15th century as a delicate, small-bodied instrument with eight strings in four courses (pairs of strings). By the 1590s, the guitar had evolved into a five course instrument. An additional course was added in Spain around 1780. The modern six string guitar first appeared in Italy and France in the late 18th century, yet it was in Spain that the instrument took root and fully blossomed. Beginning in the early 1800s, the Spanish city of Cadiz became the epicenter of guitar innovation and manufacture and, in the second half of the 19th century, Spanish maker Antonio de Torres Juarado perfected the modern classical guitar. Starting in the 1880s, American instrument manufacturers began mass-producing sturdier, inexpensive instruments, which dramatically increased the demand for the guitar at home and abroad. It was in the United States that the next great stages in guitar evolution occurred: the beginning of standardized guitar construction and body sizes in the 1880s; the introduction of the modern steel string guitar in the early 1920s; the Gibson arch-top guitar in 1923, which evolved into the popular "jazz" guitar in the 1930s; the metal-bodied National resophonic or resonator guitar in 1927; and the electric guitar in 1931.

Sometime in the early 17th century, West African slaves in the Caribbean began making string instruments that had skin-topped, drum-like bodies, made of gourd, with fretless stick necks. These new instruments had various names, such as banza, banjer and strum-strum, and looked and sounded very much like lute-type instruments found throughout West Africa: the Jola akonting (Senegambia) the Hausa gurmi (Nigeria) and the Kotoko gulom (Chad) to name but a few. They were also related to Wolof xhalam (Senegambia), Bamana n'goni (Mali), Soninke gambare (Mali, Senegambia), and other lutes played exclusively by the male professional musicians/praise singers of the griot families (also referred to in the various regional languages as jali, jeli, gewel and so on). By the middle of the 18th century, slaves in the American South were playing similar instruments called banjars or banjos. The American versions were also fretless with skin-covered gourd or wood bodies and generally had three long melody strings and one short "thumb string," which is found on many of the banjo's ancestors from the Senegambia region of West Africa. By the 1840s, the banjo had a wooden frame body with a skin head and a fretless guitar-like neck with four melody strings and a thumb string. After the Civil War, banjos with fretted necks began to appear and by 1880 the 5-string standard banjo had assumed the form we know today. In the early 1900s, four string banjos, the tenor and the plectrum, and banjo hybrids, such as the banjo-guitar, banjo-mandolin and banjo-ukulele, emerged and eventually displaced the standard banjo. The 5-string banjo survived as a folk instrument throughout rural America, especially in the South and Southwest where it was used mainly to accompany singing and dancing, as well as backing up the fiddle in old-time country music. Thanks to the advent of bluegrass music in the 1940s and the Folk Revival in the late 1950s and early '60s, the banjo, in all its many different forms, is enjoying new popularity the world over for all kinds of music.

The roots of Italian mandolin stretch back to the various Arab, Turkish and Persian bowl-back lutes such as the oud, saz, tanbur and bozuk. It evolved from the mandore, a small pear-shaped lute that first appeared in Western Europe around 1570. The mandore family came in a variety of sizes and included instruments that had four to twelve strings. In Italian, the small mandore was called the mandolino, while the larger instrument was referred to as the mandola. In the early 18th century, the Vinaccia family of Naples (Italy) standardized the mandolin into the form we know today: eight strings arranged in four courses (pairs of strings) and tuned in fifths like a violin. Starting in the 1880s, American mail order catalogs began offering bowl-backed Neapolitan mandolins, made mostly by Italian immigrants working in small shops. By the end of the 19th century, the mandolin had taken its place alongside the fiddle, guitar and banjo as a popular "American" string instrument. Old-time musicians in the rural South affectionately dubbed the Neapolitan mandolin, the "Tater Bug," because it's round back made it look like a potato bug. In the early 1900s, Gibson, an American company, patented and produced the first modern "flat-backed" mandolins. These would eventually replace the Neapolitan model as the main style of mandolin for players around the world. The modern mandolin family was created to correspond to the violin family: the mandolin is tuned like a violin, the mandola like a viola, the mandocello like a cello and the mandobass like a double bass. Mandolin orchestras sprang up in the 1890s and were popular on through the 1930s. In late 1970s and early '80s, the popularity of the mandolin in contemporary Irish and Celtic music led to creation of the octave mandolin (a larger instrument tuned an octave below the regular mandolin), the modern cittern (a five-course octave mandolin) and the Irish bouzouki (a flat-backed, long-neck octave mandolin inspired by the bowl-backed Greek bouzouki).

	Ukulele (left) with guitar (center) and machete da rajao (right), Hawaii, c.1900

The Hawaiian ukulele's roots can be traced half way around the world to the Portuguese island of Madeira. In 1879, four instrument makers, Gonsalves, Dias, Santos and Nunes, emigrated to Hawaii from Madeira and started building small guitar-like Madeiran instruments such as the tiny 4-string machete da braca (also known as the braga, a version of the Portuguese cavaquinho, which is also found in Brazil and Cape Verde) and the larger 5-string machete da rajao. The Hawaiian people fell in love with the diminutive braga and adapted it to suit their own music. They called their version of the braga "ukulele," which means "jumping flea" in the Hawaiian language-- a reference not just to the small size of the instrument, but also to the way a player's fingers rapidly "jumps" across the strings. By 1914, the ukulele had reached the American Mainland. It took center stage at San Francisco's Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915, which thrust the ukulele into the international spotlight and launched a world-wide Hawaiian music craze. During the "Roaring Twenties," the ukulele and the banjo-ukulele or banjulele (a banjo-hybrid with a ukulele neck) became symbols of the flapper and the Jazz Age. Today, there's a new craze for the ukulele and, once again, it's being strummed around the globe. Basically, the ukulele family consists of four sizes: soprano (the smallest and most common), concert, tenor and baritone. There are many different Hawaiian variations, such as the 8- string taro patch and the 6-string lili'u tenor. Close cousins of the ukulele include the Spanish/ Latin American tiple, the Andean charango, the Panamanian mejorana, the Latin American cuatro and the Mexican requinto and jarana.

Cuatro aviolinado with maracas and guitar, Puerto Rico, 1941 (Library of Congress)

Puerto Rico's national instrument, the 10-string cuatro, started life as a small 4-string guitar-like instrument sometime in the 17th century. (In Venezuela, the cuatro is still a 4-string instrument similar to the baritone ukulele.) The highly distinctive body shape of the original instrument – a circular lower half capped with an upside-down pyramid for the upper portion – earned it the nickname "el cuatro arana" (the spider cuatro) because it looked like a spider climbing up its web. From the early colonial days to the 1950s, el cuatro antiguo (the old cuatro) had four strings made of gut and was played throughout the Puetro Rican countryside to accompany religious and secular celebrations. In the 1920s, a more sophisticated version of the cuatro arana appeared in the southern region of Puerto Rico, the 8-string "Southern" cuatro (also referred to as "cuatro de dos codos" or "cuatro de dos puntos"). For next thirty years, this instrument was mainly played in ensembles performing Puerto Rico's classical music. However, by the 1940s, the older forms of the cuatro were overshadowed by the 10-string cuatro aviolinado (the violin-shaped cuatro), which has ten metal strings arrayed in five courses. It first appeared in Puetro Rico's costal towns in the early 1900s and was popularized in the mid-1930s by the renowned cuatrista Ladislao Martinez on Puerto Rico's first radio music show, Industrias Nativas. Today, the cuatro aviolinado is Puerto Rico's quintessential string instrument and is found in all of the Island's various music forms from rural jíbaro to urban danza, plena and bomba.

	Jean Ritchie playing a mountain dulcimer, Kentucky, c. 1955. (Photo by George Pickow, courtesy Oak Publications)

The Appalachian dulcimer is a fretted zither with a long narrow body, typically in the shape of a slender figure-eight or oval teardrop, and three to four strings. Another name for the Appalachian dulcimer is the lap dulcimer, because it's traditionally played laid flat across the player's lap. The player frets the strings with her/his fingers or a thin little dowel stick called a "noter" and strums the strings with a pick traditionally made from the quill of a turkey feather. In rare cases, the instrument was played with a violin bow like the Icelandic langspil, a related fretted zither. Sometime in the late 18th century the Appalachian dulcimer evolved from the scheitholt and kratz fretted zithers of the Pennsylvania Germans who migrated to Appalachia, the mountainous regions of Kentucky, Virginia, the Carolinas and Tennessee. It's descended from the various fretted zithers found throughout Northern and Central Europe and Scandinavia, such as the German scheitholt (the ancestor of the Alpine zither), the Dutch hummel, the Danish and Swedish humle, the Norwegian langeleik, the Hungarian citera and the French épinette des Vosges. Dulcimer (a combination of the Latin word dulce [sweet] and the Greek word melos [song]) is also the name of a completely different instrument, the hammer dulcimer, an open-string zither played with hammers which is an ancestor of the piano. The hammer dulcimer is found in many different forms under many different names throughout Asia, the Near and Middle East and Europe: santur (Iran, India and the Arab nations), santouri (Greece), cimbalom (Hungary), hackbrett ( Austria, Germany and Switzerland) and yang chin (China) are but a few examples.

Two-row button accordion, c. 1930

The button accordion is a free-reed instrument that is the bellows-powered sister of the harmonica, a cousin to the concertina, and an ancestor of the more familiar piano accordion. It evolved from the first  accordion, patented in Vienna, Austria in 1829 by Cyrillus Demian, and the flutina, an early paddle-keyed accordion which emerged in the 1830s. Like all accordions, the button accordion has melody buttons on the right hand and bass and chord buttons on the left. Similar to the Demian's accordion and the flutina, it works on the "Push-Pull" system, wherein each melody button is capable of playing two different notes: One note when the bellows are "pushed" inwards and a different note when the bellows are "pulled" out (the bass and chord buttons work on the same system). The melody buttons are arranged in a vertical row, diatonically -- that is, having only the notes of a specific scale. Diatonic button accordions range from one to five rowed models, with each row of melody buttons in the scale of one given key. They are used primarily in ethnic/ regional folk and popular music forms the world over, such as Brazilian Forro, Colombian Vallenato, Nigerian Juju, Tejano/Norteno (Texas-Mexican and Northern Mexican), and Louisiana Cajun and Zydeco, to name but a few. In the late 19th century, a different system of button accordion emerged in Europe, the continental chromatic, an instrument with four to six rows of melody buttons arranged to provide all the notes for all twelve musical keys. Unlike the smaller diatonic button accordions, the continental chromatic system offers only one note per melody or bass button and one chord per chord button, regardless of whether the bellows are "pushed" or "pulled." In Europe, the continental chromatic is generally favored over the related piano accordion, which is more popular on this side of the Atlantic. Along with the two-row diatonic button accordion, the continental chromatic is the preferred accordion for Scandinavian and French traditional dance music (especially for Parisian Musette music) and it's one of the most popular instruments in Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the former Soviet Union, where it's called the bayan.

	English concertina with fiddle, c. 1890

The concertina is a small accordion-like free-reed instrument that comes in a variety of styles and systems. Unlike accordions, concertinas have no chord buttons-- just individual note buttons on both sides of the instruments. The instrument's history begins with the English concertina, invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone around 1830, a fully chromatic, bellows-powered instrument with a fingering system based on Wheatstone's 24-button, mouth-blown Symphonium, patented in 1829. By 1846, the English concertina had assumed its current "standard" form with 48 buttons and hexagonal sides. In 1834, C.F. Uhlig of Chemnitz, Germany developed the Chemnitzer Konzertina or German concertina, a square-sided instrument that operates on a diatonic "push-pull" system, similar to that of the button accordion. The Chemnitzer Konzertina came to America with the Germans, Poles and other immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's still very popular in the Mid-West, where it's primarily associated with polka music. In the early 1850s, English concertina maker George Jones modified the German diatonic system and placed it in an English hexagonal body to create the Anglo-German concertina. Cheaper and easier to play than the English concertina, the Anglo became the concertina of the "common folk," played by everyone from sailors to farm hands. Nowadays, the Anglo is the favored concertina for traditional Irish and English folk dance music, while the English concertina, always considered to be more of a middle-class "parlor" instrument, is also being used for traditional music, thanks to the '60s Folk Revival. In South Africa at the end of the 19th century, cheap Anglo-German concertinas imported from Germany and Italy were picked up by black miners, who retuned the instruments to play traditional tribal scales and dubbed them "squashboxes." Eventually the squashbox became an important instrument in the evolution of Zulu and Sotho pop music. Another major type of concertina is the Bandoneon-- originally known as the Rheinische Konzertina-- which was a further development of the German system. The name "Bandoneon" is a reference to Heinrich Band, a major music merchant in Krefeld, Germany, who first began to market this instrument around 1850. Today, the Bandoneon is mostly associated with Argentinean tango and Uruguayan popular dance music.

This goblet-shaped hand drum of the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans has many different names: for example, it's called a tabla or hoqa in Egypt and Jordan, a derbocka in Morocco and Algeria, durbakee in Iraq, dumbelek in Turkey, and a dombek or zarb in Iran. Generally, however, this drum is referred to by the Persian term dumbec or the Arabic term darabukka. The origin of these names are not known but it is believed that the term "dumbec" refers to the deep "dum" sound made when the drum's head is struck in the center and the sharp "bec" sound when you strike the head's rim, while "darabukka" is probably derived from the Arabic word "darba," which means "to strike." Drums of this type have been traced back to ancient Babylonia and Sumeria, sometime around 1100 BCE. Traditionally, these drums are made of clay, wood or metal with skin heads. Nowadays, heavy aluminum bodies and adjustable plastic heads are favored by professional drummers, especially those who play in night club bands to accompany belly dancing.