AUTO HARP

USED AUTO HARP FOR SALE

Ask for price or give a bid.

The autoharp is an instrument that's rarely used in country music today, but it played a crucial role in the development of American folk music, bluegrass, Appalachian music and country music as we know it today.

Country fans may remember seeing videos of June Carter Cash performing with the unique stringed instrument. Reese Witherspoon notably portrayed Carter Cash in the movie Walk 

The Line where she is shown performing "Ring of Fire" with the autoharp. Here's a history of the classic instrument that has made such a mark in current music. The autoharp, a distinctive stringed instrument, comes from the zither family of musical instruments.

The instrument is unique in that it features strings attached to dampers which mute all the strings other than the ones needed for the desired chord. The autoharp's origin goes all the way back to 1882 when a German immigrant living in Philadelphia named Charles F. Zimmermann received a patent for a string instrument that featured a similar mechanism to today's autoharp.

 Zimmerman's mock up, which he named the autoharp, differed from modern models in that it was a symmetrically shaped version. Around the same time, Karl August Gütter of Markneukirchen, Germany created an instrument called the Volkszither, which looked more similar to the current autoharp.