An earlier post discussed an undated autobiography that Carl Friedrich (Charles Frederick) Zimmermann wrote after his emigration from Germany to the USA. Details indicate that he authored it during the 1870s and pinpoint his relocation to 1864. This date is corroborated by official documents, with 238 North Second Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as his initial base of operations. Contemporary descriptions of his activity there shed further light on the shift of his focus from accordions and concertinas to the autoharp. The autobiography says the following about that location.

I now heeded my brother’s call to America with my wife and six children, leaving two behind with my parents-in-law. A service maid in my 48th year, I took over my brother’s music store — in a sorry state at the time — while he left me four months after my arrival and traveled to Germany.

That music store can be traced back to the 1851 edition of McElroy’s Philadelphia City Directory, where it is listed as the firm of “SCHMIDT & ZIMMERMAN, impor[ters of] musical inst[ruments]” located at 408 North Second Street. The partners were Richard T. Schmidt and Charles Moritz Zimmermann, later to become known as piano and drum manufacturers respectively. Their alliance was apparently short lived, with each appearing at a different location in the following year’s edition of the same directory; Schmidt as a music teacher and Zimmermann operating a music store.

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The name Carl Friedrich (Charles Frederick) Zimmermann figures prominently in the early histories of the accordion and concertina, as well as of mechanized zithers. When discussed in the first context, his “Carlsfelder Concertina” is a frequent centerpiece, together with the importance of his factory in Carlsfeld to the local economy. It is usually noted in passing that he later shifted his attention to the autoharp. When that instrument is the main focus, mention is sometimes made of his having started out as an accordion maker, but his significance in that field is rarely discussed further.

Writers approaching Zimmermann from either perspective have relied on an autobiography found in the personal archives of his corporate successor in the US, Rudolf Dolge. Alvin Doyle Moore brought it to light by including passages translated from the original German in his seminal article from 1963, “The Autoharp: Its Origin and Development from a Popular to a Folk Instrument,” published in the New York Folklore Quarterly (vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 261–74; reprinted in 1967 by Harry Taussig in the Folk Style Autoharp). Becky Blackley paraphrased the autobiography more extensively in The Autoharp Book, from 1983.

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