Profile: Vincent Farsetta

A Full Measure, Pitch Perfect

By Linda Paulus

His blessings began in 1952 when he was born to an Italian-American family in New York. His parents raised him in a home overflowing in music, singing, and laughter. In 1966, his mother gave him his first guitar for Christmas. In 1970, he played around with a friend’s dulcimer to see what they could do together.

By 2024, call him a 21st century Renaissance Man – a jack of all trades and a master of more than seems humanly possible in just one lifetime. A composer, writer, arranger, producer, performer, and multi-instrumentalist who has written music for the movies, and who has worked with the best in the business. He has lived some very high-spirited times, some of which he’s too shy to share with just anybody.

Vincent Farsetta didn’t start life in the mountain places that eventually would infuse his soul. He was born just thirty miles from New York City while Jean Richie and Alan Lomax were jumpstarting urban interest in the Appalachian dulcimer, and where folk music waves were washing over, around, and through Greenwich Village. 

Growing up, he absorbed the sounds and colors of world music through headphones connected to his parents’ HiFi. He listened to it all: swing music from the forties, crooners like Frank Sinatra, Roger Miller, Motown, and traditional Italian tunes. At night in his bedroom, headphones donned, he tuned into college radio stations to listen to rock and roll, his love of music firmly embedded in his DNA. 

At 19, he was a self-taught musician who played a mean guitar and an African three-stringed bass. Then, like many of his peers, he heard a new album, “Will The Circle Be Unbroken,” and his life was set. The young Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s collaboration with country music royalty lit Farsetta’s imagination. At age 20, he hitchhiked to West Virginia to sit at the knees and learn from the best old-time Appalachian players in the world. Soon he was improvising on guitar and fiddle right beside them on their porches and at festivals. They taught him the ways of the forest and foraging, of fishing, and of living simply. Through them, he learned the rhythms of storytelling, music, and nature and would pay them homage his whole life.

The experience piqued his interest in the banjo, so, upon his return to New York, he saved up pay from his post office job and bought one. American music had grabbed him tightly, and he returned the embrace. He became a sonic pathfinder who explored multiple genres of music: old mento, reggae, ska, country, calypso, rhythm and blues, bluegrass, rock, and Americana. 

Throughout a life lived in and for music, Farsetta always worked hard to supplement his income in between gigs. He became a skilled tradesman in construction and roofing; he turned out woodworking so well-designed and crafted that people sought him out to build everything from garages to furniture. Like the very best of his folk music peers, he became a luthier. 

Along the way he garnered first place ribbons in six state and regional banjo championships and twice won the Banjo National Championship. He worked as a much-admired singer/songwriter, a master session musician for the likes of three-time Grammy winner Lucinda Williams, Gove Scrivener, and many other Nashville big-name music stars. He could fiddle, drum, play electric bass; he played the fire out of the guitar and the mountain dulcimer. 

He spent ten years volunteering to teach children songwriting in the Country Music Hall of Fame’s Words and Music educational program. He was and is a master storyteller topped by a giant helping of joie de vivre and intense curiosity about the world. His friends esteem him for his lightning quick, wicked sense of humor almost as much as for his musicality. (He once playfully proclaimed himself “Vincent Ban Jogh”.) He’s a custodian of folk music history and memories from the last sixty years that he didn’t have to read in a book because he lived it all.

So, how did this shooting star come to be? Sometimes, hindsight reveals seemingly uncanny events that are arrows pointing to future seminal experiences and relationships. Vincent and David Schnaufer had three such events that eventually led both to Nashville. One took place in 1972. Despite having been raised 1600 miles apart, in Texas and New York, the two twenty-year olds first crossed paths on the National Mall.

Drawn by the music of the Highwood Strings Band, both stood in the crowds, yet didn’t meet. Six years later, and, by now, a busy, in-demand musician, Vincent was in Austin, Texas, performing across the street from the University of Texas with his band the Good Tones when the second being-in-the-same-time-and-place event happened: an aspiring dulcimer player stood and watched. His eyes and ears fixed on one of the band members with dark, curly hair who was playing the fire out of a fiddle. They didn’t meet then, either. (David Schnaufer later said that was the day he recognized Vincent’s musical genius.) 

Finally, a year later, David and Vincent met at Bonnie Carol’s Boulder, Colorado, festival, Rabbit Junction. This time, David recognized Vincent by his Good Tones t-shirt. They arrived strangers, but they left filled with mutual admiration. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

Rabbit Junction

This summer I was finally able to attend some dulcimer festivals, the Rabbit Junction Dulcimer Festival in Boulder, Colorado, and the North Pacific Rim Kindred Gathering V (KGV) in Point Arena, California. Both were almost purely mountain dulcimer gatherings (there were also a few excellent hammer dulcimer people and one hurdy gurdy player) without any contests or competitions attracting many fine players.

Rabbit Junction was centered around the Boulder Public Library and offered a nice stage with a good sound system through which some 100 hours of recordings were made. There were many good workshops covering most every subject relating to the dulcimer (and more), reflecting the great variety of styles and techniques of the players who were attracted to the festival. It was a real mix of East and West Coast players who played any and everything, including traditional folk, Irish jigs and reels, bluegrass, ragtime, and contemporary and original songs and instrumentals. I never saw and/or heard so many good players in one place. There were at least four hours of scheduled concerts each day, as well as one full evening of open stage performances. …

To mention all of the folks involved with both festivals would necessitate another article, but special thanks should go to Bonnie Carol for sponsoring Rabbit Junction and to David Schnaufer for the help and support he gave her. Albert d’Ossche put the Kindred Gathering together with lots of help from Tom Moore and his friends in Point Arena. 

Willie Jaeger, DPN Archives Vol. 6 No. 1 (1980)

Since David was living with Alan Freeman and Vincent had performed with and played on records for Freeman, the three came together in 1984 to record a demo record David planned to take to Nashville. With Freeman and Schnaufer on mountain dulcimers and Vincent on bass and electric guitar, the trio worked with additional friends on rhythm and drums to turn out “Rosie’s Arms and other Retreats,” David’s calling card for the Nashville music business.

Eventually, Vincent followed David to Nashville. As the two pounded the pavement for work and played local gigs, they became inseparable. After seeing them perform together in Texas, John Nova Lomax, at the time a journalist for the Houston Chronicle, wrote, “The Schnaufer/Farsetta duo was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen or heard. Each could simultaneously play rhythm and melody. It sounded as if there were at least four musicians on stage.” 

Vincent had other talents, too. He opened “Music City Graphics” as a sideline for his custom designed clothing in between writing, composing, arranging, and performing. David wore a jacket Vincent had designed and embroidered on the cover of his first album, “Dulcimer Deluxe.” While Vincent kept playing with bands everywhere with and without David, they co-wrote and arranged songs for David’s best-selling “Dulcimer Player Deluxe.“

A young, up-and-coming player named Stephen Seifert unwrapped the cellophane and listened closely. “Hearing David and Vincent play ‘Pitch a Fit’ changed my life forever. It made me want to learn dulcimer and banjo.” In the early nineties and now partnered with Schnaufer, Seifert recalls: “I remember David saying, ‘You know that Tim O’Brien backup mandolin style (chording and strumming rhythm rather than picking)? That’s Farsetta. He came up with that style of playing’ … Vincent is one of the best musicians I’ve ever known.” 

Vincent experimented early with fusion music and accomplished the unthinkable. One reviewer writes: “There’s no reason at all to expect that a clawhammer banjo player could turn out a decent ska album. But if one were to do it, it would be Vince Farsetta, who has been kicking at the boundaries of old-time banjo for years.” Along the way he invented a harmonica holder so he could play the mouth harp while he fiddled. A skilled photographer, Vincent snapped one of the most well-known photos of Schnaufer that was widely disseminated after he died.

In 1997, Vincent wrote, arranged, and produced his first album, “Ever More.” French reviewer Claude Vue described Vincent’s six originals and twelve arrangements of traditional mountain tunes as “inventive and wickedly fun … his own composition; ‘Buryin’ the Rye’ is a stroke of genius.” … “Farsetta breathes life in the best of the old time tradition, and his original tunes easily stand up to [them].” Other reviewers were effusive in their praise as well: “awesome technical precision [on] his blistering picking” … “brilliant musicality” … “his sparkling playing draws you into Appalachian mountain traditions.” 

David, intrigued by Vincent’s versatility and banjo skills, learned old time claw-hammer banjo with his help. When luthier Doug Thomson showed David his Banjo-Mer, a dulcimer with banjo features, after meeting him at Winfield, Kansas, in 1999, David said right away, “I want one!” 

Walter Winchell’s observation that “A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out” applies here: Vincent never, ever walks out on his friends. He opened for Townes Van Zandt and performed with David Schnaufer on several tours around the country including the Everly Brothers Tour. When Nashville luthier Moses Scrivner passed away, Vince built and shipped all the dulcimers to fulfill Scrivner’s many pending orders – gratis. 

He has one foot firmly planted in the past when he played and partied with singer/songwriter pals such as Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and John Prine. He and David Schnaufer’s shared values, friends, and music tastes were so well interwoven they became like the tightest brothers. Today, Vincent’s other foot currently pounds perfect time on the floor while he plays with band buddies, in solo performances, and in jams with friends. 

Farsetta was entitled to stand his ground. When he plays, an irresistible groove materializes, inspiring audiences to move and sing. What is it about music that he loves so much? Farsetta shares: “Music means freedom to me. It allows me to be creative; to share feelings and emotions with friends and audiences. Over the years it has given me a community of friends who have become extended family.”

When asked what being a multi-instrumentalist does for him, he explains that different instruments give him a wider range of colors and textures to experiment with and to shape moods and feelings. A visitor watched him play his dulcimer; he didn’t pick and strum the strings so much as he massaged them, coaxing the dulcimer’s voice to express feelings of lightness, wistfulness, and then on to playfulness. After he hears a G#, he picks it three or four times with a smile, saying how much he loves that sound.

In the early 1980s it was his buddy David who introduced Vincent to manager and producer John Lomax III. The two hit it off immediately. Lomax explains why:

“I was fascinated because not only was he an extraordinary old style, claw-hammer banjo player, but he had this incredible knowledge of and ability to play reggae, ska and calypso … not just to play it but to write songs and sing it in those genres … we could sit and yak about reggae as well as old time banjo, country, and all kinds of music. He’s very well-informed not only as a player, but for keeping up with whatever is going on in music. He always was and is an interesting conversationalist besides being a virtuoso musician. And he was great fun in the studio when we worked on ‘Dulcimer Player Deluxe,’ just full of enthusiasm for the process.” 

John Lomax III

As often happens, life comes full circle. In March Vincent heeded the call to travel from Pennsylvania to a Nashville studio to perform on five tracks for John Lomax III’s upcoming album “Lomax on Lomax.” Along with his banjo, mandolin, and jaw harp, Farsetta packed a stunning mountain dulcimer he made for himself thirty years ago with leftover 1950’s mahogany from the Martin Guitar Company. He crafted the dulcimer with resonance and sustain that can only be described as a transcendent piece of artisanship with superb output. 

Today, when he’s not gardening, writing, composing, teaching himself how to design and craft silver jewelry, or playing on his buddies’ albums or at festivals, Vincent still performs for his fans and inspires others. He plays weekly in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia, at Big Sandy Brews, accepts private gigs, and will perform at several upcoming festivals with the group Stewed Mulligan. 

When asked if folk music is on the way up, down, or in a steady state, he was optimistic: “A lot of younger people are getting into folk music, and Americana, and going to festivals. They play better than we did back in the day. Their degree of musicianship impresses.” Talking to Vincent suggests that inside there still lives a twenty-year old wunderkind whose purpose in life is perhaps best expressed by Leftover Salmon: “Live Rowdy, Live Loudly, Stay Up Late, Make Friends, Make Peace, Make Music!” 

Find Vincent on YouTube at youtube.com/@vincentfarsetta4686. He will have a new website soon – watch for vincentfarsetta.com. 

Linda Paulus is a mountain dulcimer player and the author of “Pluck: The Extraordinary Life and Times of David Schnaufer.” Visit davidschnauferpluck.com for information about the book and to read “The Pluck Blog.”