[1] Spence began playing the hammered dulcimer after hearing Howie Mitchell at the 1969 Fox Hollow Festival in Petersburgh, New York.
The only hammered dulcimer recordings available at the time were by Mitchell and another player, Chet Parker on the Folkways label.
In 1970, Spence helped form Fennig's All-Stars, which featured his hammered dulcimer as the lead instrument.
The album was widely distributed (over 60,000 copies have been sold), and became very influential in the early part of the hammered dulcimer revival.
He worked for the Army Security Agency until 1965, and then at the State University of New York at Albany as an audio-visual and computer graphics specialist until retiring in 1998.