Nut Factory Shuffle: A Song History
"Nut Factory Shuffle" is not a traditional tune but a modern one, made up on the mountain dulcimer by Gil Anderson (Gilbert M. Anderson Jr., 1947–2024), a New York dulcimer maker.[1][2] In notes to his tab of another Anderson tune, Tull Glazener traces Anderson's start on the instrument to a Syracuse coffee house in 1976, when he was teaching art. Dulcimers were then scarce, so about a year later Anderson took a building class; before long he and his wife, Beth, were selling his instruments at Northeastern craft shows under the business name Dulcimer Daze.[1]
Rural arts exhibition held by the Farm Security Administration at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, showing dulcimers, fiddles and other handmade instruments, photograph, 1937. Library of Congress. Public domain.
Glazener places the tune's birth at one of those shows, held in a shopping mall, where Anderson was improvising on a dulcimer as customers came and went from a roasted-nut shop; it has since become a standard at jam sessions nationwide.[1] Anderson's obituary, which gives no exact year, puts his tunes "Nut Factory Shuffle" and "Dulcimer Daze" roughly forty years before his death and says both are "still widely played across the country today."[2]
Anderson had trained as an artist at SUNY New Paltz, studying painting, sculpture and art education, and his Dulcimer Daze business, where he developed a dulcimer design of his own, later merged with Folkcraft Instruments.[2] The tune appears in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer collection Join the Jam II.[3]
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