Kara Barnard, at right, leads a Kara’s Silver Strings class at Mill Race Center, Columbus, Ind. Photo Provided
Creative powerhouse and entrepreneur Kara Barnard doesn’t make a regular appearance at Mill Race Center; however, her presence is still felt through the Silver Strings mountain dulcimer classes the center presents. Both beginners and next-step classes are being presented weekly through October 24.
Teachers, Shannon Truman and Kathy Riesenmey, who use the materials and lesson plans Barnard created, can have even the most musically unschooled person playing music on the mountain dulcimer after one lesson.
“That’s the beauty of the program,” said Barnard. “I created this curriculum so that anyone can go through it – people with sight issues, stroke victims.”
Teaching is Barnard’s passion. She’s been giving lessons on various instruments since high school. The Silver Strings classes, designed for people 60 and over, are being taught in an ever-growing number of places. Barnard devotes one day of her busy week to bringing it to even more people.
The 2022 National Mountain Dulcimer champion also teaches mandolin, guitar and banjo. Her qualifications in all of them are impressive. In 2012, she founded the Indiana State Fingerstyle Guitar Contest, held annually at the Brown County Playhouse, attracting top players from all over the world. It’s accredited by the Walnut Valley Festival, an annual event held in Winfield, Kansas, where she caught the string-band bug. Walnut Valley is also the organization that conferred the 2022 National Mountain Dulcimer championship to her.
For 17 years, Barnard had an ongoing gig at Brown County State Park, where she laid out an autoharp, mandolin, banjo, guitar and musical saw on a table in front of her and would demonstrate and provide the history of each to people. The rest of her story should be told in chronological order to cover her roles as a cartoonist, store owner and recording artist.
The Bloomfield native’s parents were both painters and musicians who instilled a creative ethos in the entire family.
“When I was a kid, we were all constantly writing songs,” said Barnard.
Barnard ran the lesson program at Guitar Works in Greenwood for 10 years, teaching 60 private students a week. Then she moved to Brown County, the locale she is so closely associated with, 35 years ago and began gigging and recording with a heavy metal band.
“A lot of really well-known bluegrass musicians got their start there,” she said.
She sold her caricatures in the first store she had in Nashville, Indiana. Then a bit of local news moved her retailing activities in a musical direction.
“When I heard that Bill Berg’s Mountain Made Music was closing, I thought, well, Brown County can’t be without a music store, so I started Weed Patch Music,” she said.
Barnard owned Weed Patch for 20 years until 3 years ago when her protégé, Kristin Thompson, took the helm.
With her sister Pam, who has television-acting credits and musical chops, Barnard has recorded several albums and opened for acts like James Taylor and Dave Matthews. She also has several solo albums to her name.
Barnard started the Silver Strings program with another business partner, Eric Rose. They’ve placed 200 self-made dulcimers, along with instruction books in centers such as Mill Race, throughout Indiana and Kentucky. She gives private lessons on mandolin, dulcimer, banjo and guitar, and conducts group dulcimer lessons at the Brown County YMCA, Mondays through Thursdays, and devotes Fridays to developing Silver Strings.
A recent challenge has slowed Barnard down a bit. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2024.
She said, “I have to be so bad I can barely sit up to cancel lessons.”
While she prepared to go to Mountain View, Arkansas, to teach at a festival, she waited for more test results.
“I loaded up my car, and the last thing I did before I left Indiana was stop by my oncologist’s office,” she said. “My PT scan was good, so I went to Arkansas and partied. I knew when I got back, I’d be starting chemo, and that it would be a rough ride, but I’d make it.”
Of the Silver Strings rollout at Mill Race, she said: “They’re killing it.”
The center received a grant from the Heritage Fund that enabled it to obtain the materials.
“We have 10 dulcimers, 10 music stands, 10 books, and picks,” said Shannon Truman, Mill Race operations and program director. “Kara has thought of everything. She even provided wooden spoons cut to fit a student’s hand for those with difficulty pressing the strings to the frets.”
The process of bringing Silver Strings to Mill Race began when Truman met Barnard at a dog-training class.
“I had no knowledge of the dulcimer and asked who we’d get to teach the courses?” said Truman.
Alas, she was the first instructor and still teaches the Book Two course.
“The books are large print,” Truman said, “and the fretboards on the dulcimers are numbered.”
Kathy Riesenmey, who teaches the Book One course, was in the first class that Truman taught.
“I’d never even heard of a dulcimer before the Heritage Fund grant,” she said.
Riesenmey observed that “what it’s done for the seniors is really wonderful. We have new people in every Book One class.”
Truman said, “Our hope is to make it part of the Mill Race On-the-Go program, where we take mobile classes to other senior centers.”
It’s a testament to the ease of the course that two people who were previously unacquainted with dulcimers are now teaching others how to play.
Said Truman, “Kara thought of all the adaptations that were going to be needed.”
