The Academy Award-winning documentary short film The Last Repair Shop portrays the musical instrument repairers who work for the Los Angeles County public school system as healers (Bowers and Proudfoot 2023). These craftspeople fix broken violins, pianos, clarinets, and tubas to enable local students to learn music, and their work helps them repair their own lives along the way. A similar focus on finding meaning through wooden instrument crafting, or lutherie animates Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth's book Finding the Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia's Mountain Forests (2023). Waugh-Quasebarth, Director and Archivist of the Ohio State University Center for Folklore Studies, draws on ethnographic fieldwork he conducted from 2014 to 2018 in West Virginia's Allegheny Mountains to examine local luthiers’ relationships to their creative labor, to the forest that surrounds them, to the historical and contemporary Appalachian timber industry, and to global economies that touch down in Romania's logging industry...

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