Hind Musical Instruments

Charlie Hind’s wooden ocarinas, the copy the museum keeps of hindocarina.com, and the 1930s history he rescued and put on it.

A note from the museum

hindocarina.com is live. This is not a copy of something that disappeared — it is a copy made because the Internet Archive’s coverage of the site has been thinning year on year, and because of what is on it. Please visit the original.

This page is the museum’s account of what it holds. It is not by Charlie Hind, and nothing from his site is republished here.

Charlie Hind has made wooden ocarinas in South Carolina since 1982. He publishes his own dated list of milestones, and it is the clearest account of an American instrument-making career that this museum has found anywhere: a viola player who took a night class in woodworking in 1975, was told by one of the best recorder makers in the world that he would need to become a machinist, believed him, and bought a metal lathe.

He writes candidly about being turned away — by an apprenticeship he could not afford to take, by violin work that did not suit him, by a workshop he left after three months. He gave up twice and went back to school for electronic engineering. Ocarina sales brought him back.

What turned him toward ocarinas was a single purchase by somebody else. His employer returned from a show in Florida in 1981 with two instruments, one of them a wooden double by Alan Albright, and set about designing a wooden ocarina of his own. Hind made his first ones in that shop that summer, and over the following year acquired five sizes of Albright’s instruments for his own collection and studied them. The museum has found Albright at the root of an American maker’s work twice now, by two entirely separate routes.

He holds a patent of his own, and it is a teaching instrument disguised as a technical one. US 4,893,541, “Pentatonic Ocarina”, filed in May 1988 with a co-inventor, Ilania H. Fowler, claims a chamber with no more than three finger holes — few enough that the instrument can only produce the pentatonic scale. The specification explains why that is the point: the scale has no semitones, so “any combination of notes within the scale will automatically harmonize.” It is an ocarina on which a beginner cannot play a wrong note.

The part that isn’t his

The most valuable thing on hindocarina.com is not about Charlie Hind.

Over many years he assembled — and published — the record of The Potato Bugs, a group of Minneapolis schoolboys who in the 1930s made the first wooden ocarinas in the United States.

Their inventor was John Stewart Sumner (1921–1993, latterly professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona, and killed in an aircraft accident in Mexico), who got tired of dropping clay ocarinas and breaking them and made one out of wood instead, cutting the centres out of thin sheets with a jigsaw and gluing them up in layers. He was still at school. The patent — US 2,194,332, filed 16 March 1938, granted 19 March 1940 — covers that laminated construction, and it is still how American wooden ocarinas are made. Its third and fourth claims cover something else again: a two-chambered double ocarina with two blow slits, for playing melody and accompaniment at once. It is assigned to two other Minneapolis men, Lawrence H. McEwen and Iner Oliver Engebretson.

That date is worth sitting with. It is two years before the Waterbury patent and nine before Gretsch, which makes it the earliest American ocarina-manufacturing document this museum holds; and it means the wooden double ocarina in America is a great deal older than the museum had supposed.

Sumner and his friends also toured with the big bands, recorded for RCA and Columbia, and appeared in Call Me Madam. He then left music for geology, flew combat in two wars, and spent the rest of his working life as a professor of geophysics — inventing, in his forties, a second instrument of his own design.

Hind tracked down a surviving member in 1993 and was given a copy of a cassette that another member had recorded before his death in 1985, narrating the group’s history and carrying recordings from it. He digitised it and put all sixteen tracks online, with the newspaper scans and photographs, saying that his intent was to insure that this important part of our ocarina history is not lost.

That is this museum’s purpose, stated by someone else, twenty years earlier. The museum’s copy exists so that if hindocarina.com goes the way of the other sites on this page, that material does not go with it.

What the museum holds

682 files, 42.8 MB.

87	pages
377	photographs and illustrations
56	sound recordings
20	PDF documents
79	small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers

Crawled directly from the live site in September 2026, honouring its robots.txt, including the ten-second delay it asks for.

Rights, and what is published

Nothing.

Charlie Hind is living, and has not yet been asked. Preserving something and publishing it are different acts, and the museum will do the first without the second.

The Potato Bugs material carries further conditions that the museum intends to respect whatever anyone’s rights turn out to be. The man who made the tape asked on it that the recordings not be put to commercial use. The music on it belongs to its composers, the record companies and the broadcasters; the newspaper scans belong to their newspapers; the instruments and the papers belong to the families.

If any of this is yours, please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com.

hindocarina.com — still there, and worth your time.