08/20/2026
Sharing in gratitude for the dulcimer community.
I am very grateful to the alert and eagle-eyed Nelson. who saw some arrangements of mine from my best-selling 50 First Songs You Should Play on Mountain Dulcimer by Hal Leonard in what is clearly a pirated rip-off book available on Amazon.com.
I checked: there is no publisher on the covers of the book, no author and all of the copyright information at the bottom of the original pages has been deleted...but 41 of my 50 arrangements are the bulk of the 75 songs in her book. The balance are arrangements from Jim Schustedt's book, Dulcimer Songbook, also published by Hal Leonard the year after it became clear how popular mine had become.
I collected the relevant data and sent it both to Jim and to my project manager at Hal Leonard who has prompted their lawyer to initiate the cease-and-desist to the Vender and to get the book taken down from Amazon.
I think that Goliath's lawyer might win this one.
In addition to Gail's message, Butch Ross contacted me about this today also.
So despite my initial sense of an encounter with a quite bold thief of intellectual property, I am grateful that we have a community of dulcimer players who are observant, astute and well-equipped music/tablature readers to recognize the arrangements, and who are loyal to each other.
I Celebrate Life!
