Dulcimer Players News

• October 09, 2026
• by Vicki L. Friedman

Honoring a lifelong connection to traditional music.

Reprinted with permission from Dulcimer Players News, Vol. 52 No. 3, August 2026. Visit dpnews.com.

(Photos courtesy of Kendra Ward and Bob Bence)

Kendra Ward's life has been one big jam session.

For more than 40 years, this acclaimed hammered and mountain dulcimer artist and her husband, Bob Bence, have shared traditional Appalachian music with audiences around the globe.

"That music speaks to me and my heritage; it's in my soul," says Kendra, who lives on 265 acres in rural Gallia County in southeast Ohio, home to generations of Wards. "It's just so much a part of me."

Kendra grew up in a musical family and is one of a handful of mountain dulcimer players who learned through generational family tradition rather than the folk revival. Her grandmother Lillie played a mountain dulcimer handcrafted in 1894, known locally as a dulcerine. Kendra's father, Kenneth Ward, later passed this treasured West Virginia/Eastern Kentucky heirloom to her, and she has performed with it on stage ever since.

Young Kendra with her parents, Martha and Kenneth Ward, holding dulcimers.

"We never played with the dulcerine on our laps," Kendra says. "We usually set it on a piano bench in front of us. That gives you so much more room to really fly up and down the strings on fast fiddle tunes."

Lillie's dulcimer was crafted from chestnut wood, well before the chestnut blight of the early 1900s devastated the American chestnut tree population. Kendra has never been able to trace the exact origins of the instrument, but she notes that Thomas Lincoln, father of Abraham Lincoln, owned a very similar mountain dulcimer with the classic hourglass shape and three round sound holes.

"Abraham Lincoln is my first cousin four times removed," Ward says.

Lillie played dulcimer and clawhammer banjo, and at just 4 years old, Kendra knew she wanted to play, too. Her father was pleased and excited to teach her "Three Little Indians," a tune he thought beginners could pick up quickly.

Kendra insisted that she wanted to play the hymn "The Unclouded Day."

"That's a little too hard," her dad said. "I don't think you can learn that one first."

Even as a toddler, Kendra was confident. "I'll just teach myself!" she said.

This hymn was indeed the first song Kendra learned to play. When she grew a little older, her father had a dulcimer made for her from a walnut table that had belonged to her great-great-grandmother on Lillie's side.

Soon father and daughter played together, melody and harmony. Her mother, Martha, who had a knack for chording, joined in. Kenneth Ward independently invented 1-3-5 tuning, and that is the tuning Martha used.

"We played music every Saturday night of my life," Kendra says. Sometimes it was in the holler where she lived. Other times, it was nearby with uncles, aunts, and cousins who played banjos, fiddles and guitars. They favored old gospel and Appalachian fiddle tunes, anything from the Carter family, lots of Flatt and Scruggs, and Bill Monroe. Her dad also led a regional band called the Morgan Raiders.

Kendra first saw a hammered dulcimer as a young girl at an Ohio University professor's home with her father. Though it wasn't playable, the instrument left a lasting impression. A few years later, at a festival in West Virginia in the 1970s, she heard a captivating new sound.

"What is that?" she asked. It was Worley Gardner, a legendary hammered dulcimer player who later founded the Gardner Winter Music Festival with his wife, Margaret. Gardner kindly showed Kendra how he used the hammers and mentioned that his brother Asel built dulcimers.

"I've got to have one," the 10-year-old urged her parents. Her father, Kenneth, agreed, as long as she paid half. Kendra used her birthday savings to make it happen.

Her first hammered dulcimer was tuned in fourths across the bridge, unlike the fifths tuning common today. "I actually learned to play on this instrument that was not like any other," Kendra says. "I played it for years before I ever saw another hammered dulcimer player."

It wasn't until she attended a festival in Roscoe Village in Coshocton, Ohio, that she finally saw and heard a fifth-tuned hammered dulcimer, the style she plays most today.

Kendra playing her hammered dulcimer as a teenager, after hearing Worley Gardner at a festival in West Virginia.

Kendra earned a degree in education from the University of Rio Grande in Rio Grande, Ohio. She taught as a traditional schoolteacher for just one year. Her career path quickly changed in 1983 after she auditioned to play hammered dulcimer at Kings Island amusement park in Cincinnati.

She got the gig and joined a banjo player for six shows a day, six days a week.

It was at Kings Island that Kendra met a rising senior attending Ohio State University. Bob Bence was in charge of rides at the park. He also played guitar and did some local improv comedy, including getting a gig doing promotional work for a Richard Pryor film.

"Somehow they booked me," Bob said. "I have no idea how they even knew to contact me."

"When I first met Kendra, I assumed she and the banjo player were a couple," Bob says with a laugh. "Turns out they weren't. He was actually dating a mime. I always joked, 'She didn't talk about it much.'"

Near the end of that summer, Bob realized Kendra was single. "So we started hanging out," he says, "and we've been together ever since." Kendra and Bob were married in 1985.

Kendra Ward was named Best All-Around Performer at the 88th Annual Old Fiddler's Convention in Galax, Virginia, in 2024.

Born in Atlanta and raised in Tennessee, Bob wasn't accustomed to the kind of life that shaped Kendra. His family wasn't overly musical. Seeing Kendra's home firsthand was eye opening.

"I was intimidated by the remoteness of it," Bob says.

The first time Bob visited what is now his home in the Appalachian foothills, he could have really used a GPS, if only it had been invented.

"I used to tell Kendra it would be simpler to hire somebody to fly me over and I'd bail out with a parachute," he says with a laugh. "I wasn't sure I'd ever figure it out."

Bob, who had grown up far from the hollers of southeast Ohio, found himself drawn into a musical world he had never known. Early on, Bob and Kendra put together a duo act for local gigs, Bob on guitar and Kendra on hammered dulcimer. His enthusiasm for a nontraditional career path grew quickly from there.

"I started getting serious about music after hearing her dad play," he says. "It was always a real treat to hear Kenneth play fiddle. I never met Kendra's grandmother Lillie, but I heard the recordings they made back in the 1950s which can be found in the Library of Congress. All of that pulled me deep into the traditional music world, and I got completely hooked."

During what he calls his first real date with Kendra, in September 1983, they traveled to Winfield, Kansas, for the Walnut Valley Festival. By the time they arrived, the main stage performances were over for the day, but a lively jam session was in full swing.

"I was basically in awe," Bob says. "And I thought, 'You know what? That's what I want to do.'"

Becoming a professional musician was a tough sell for Bob's parents, though he knew he could always count on their support. Kendra's parents, on the other hand, were all in.

"We took a chance," says Kendra. She moved to Columbus and began teaching hammered dulcimer through an adult education class at Ohio State. The course outline she developed for that class eventually grew into her own original tablature system and her first book, "The Hammered Dulcimer Handbook."

The first edition, published in 1984, features Kendra on the cover playing her favorite instrument. The cover illustration was sketched by Bob's Aunt Georgia.

That early teaching experience planted the seed for decades of sharing songs from the hills of Appalachia.

Their chemistry is genuine and effortless. With their easygoing, casual style, they're a natural fit on stage. At nearly every concert, they play a courting dulcimer, an instrument built for two. It's the same one Kendra's father made from cherry wood from the farm and played with her mother for decades.

Kendra's parents, Martha and Kenneth Ward, playing courting dulcimer at an outdoor gathering in the 1970s.

"We've always been able to know what's going to happen on stage before it happens," Bob says. "I don't need to think about what Kendra is going to play. I somehow know what she's going to play before she plays it and then I play something complimentary to that."

Kendra also deeply respects the craftsmanship of the older builders and pays homage to them during her performances. She hopes today's mountain dulcimer teachers and players will develop a greater appreciation for the rich history and traditions of the instrument.

Kendra performing on mountain dulcimer at the Fraley Festival of Traditional Music in eastern Kentucky.

"I think it's important for people to understand where the dulcimer came from," Kendra says. "The past is what created the present and the future, and the past should never be forgotten."

Bob and Kendra love introducing others to the dulcimer. For the last several years, they have participated in a weeklong program that teaches sixth graders to build and play their own dulcimers using Folkcraft cardboard kits. At the end of the week, each child gets to keep the instrument they built, as well as a book that Kendra and Bob developed specifically for the class.

"This year we had almost 90 kids," Kendra says with a smile.

Their priority: keeping traditional music alive.

"I would like to see more opportunities for the remaining traditional mountain dulcimer players to teach and perform the traditional way at festivals and events," Kendra says. "Too often, players who grew up with the modern style end up teaching traditional classes, when it should really be the older traditional players passing on the authentic style and techniques."

Whether teaching or performing, Bob and Kendra simply can't imagine life without making music together.

"It's fundamental to who we are," Bob says.

Every once in a while, an old-timer will approach Kendra and ask, "Are you still out there playing that dulcerine?"

Yes. Forever and always.

Kendra Ward and Bob Bence at Blennerhassett Island, where they regularly perform period music in Regency-style clothing.

Find Kendra Ward and Bob Bence online at dulcimertimes.com.

 

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