When country music star Ricky Skaggs began looking for a special fiddle, he could have gone anywhere in the world. Instead, he reached into the Virginia hills and a self-taught instrument maker named Arthur Connor.
The retired Floyd County railroad man began fabricating fiddles more than 25 years ago as gifts for his many children. Starting from scratch, he made his first few examples with the advice of friends and help from an instruction book.
Today, Connor is one of several dozen instrument makers – most of them working part time in their shops or homes – who have kept an old Blue Ridge tradition vital. Stretching from Lynchburg southwest to the North Carolina border, the region has become nationally known for the folk instruments its artisans have produced during the past 200 years.
Some of the finest fruits of that labor can be seen in “Blue Ridge Folk Instruments and Their Makers,” a collection of more than 65 fiddles, banjos, guitars and other instruments on view through Sept. 6 at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center.
Among them is a Connor ram’s head fiddle similar to the one owned by Skaggs.
“It’s always been a highly localized kind of thing, with most instrument makers working at it part time and only being known within a family, a town or maybe an area of three or four counties,” says Blue Ridge Institute associate director Vaughn Webb, who helped organize the exhibit.
“But at the same time that they’re very local, some of these people have developed national reputations.”
The Blue Ridge region’s rich musical heritage reaches back to the early settlers – English, German, African, Scottish and Irish – who began turning its forests into cropland during the late 18th century.
Those diverse cultural traditions combined to create a sound that is recognized around the world today, Webb says.
Though the first inhabitants to make their own instruments remain unknown, scholars have turned up a Floyd County dulcimer signed and dated in 1832. The earliest work in the exhibit – a gourd, animal hide and mixed-wood fiddle – was found in Carroll County and may date back as far as 1800, Webb says.
Both kinds of instruments, as well as the banjo, began to appear with greater and greater frequency in wills, household inventories and other documents as the century wore on.
Despite such signs of popular interest, however, researchers have failed to turn up any professional instrument makers in 19th-century census records.
Then, as now, most of the artisans labored in their spare time, making the bulk of their work for family members and friends.
Many produced only a relatively small number of instruments during their careers.
As a result, few scholars or collectors express surprise when they run across makers that – up until then – haven’t been heard of by anybody except their relatives and neighbors.
“This is not something that’s driven by economic factors – and it probably never was,” says Blue Ridge Institute director Roddy Moore.
“We still don’t have one person who makes a livelihood from making instruments.”
That lack of cash return may have been bad for the makers’ pocketbooks, but it has frequently proved good for the instruments they made.
From the beginning, many of the Blue Ridge craftsmen have showed an uncanny lack of inhibitions about tinkering and experimenting with traditional forms, Webb says.
Some of the changes came about because of differences in technical skill, while others resulted from the unconventional materials with which the instruments were put together.
About 1900, for example, an unknown Roanoke County craftsman produced a flat, geometric-shaped fiddle, probably because of his inability to bend the wood. A Grayson County maker, also unknown, used an animal shinbone as the tailpiece of another fiddle made at about the same time.
The same kind of make-do impulses help explain the old cheese-box banjos and the cigar-box fiddle also on display in the exhibit. Another banjo, crafted in 1980 by Price Pugh of Franklin County, gives needed strength to the instrument’s rim by incorporating an aluminum brake drum from a junkyard Buick.
Even more unexpected are the copper fiddle and violin fabricated during the 1970s by Franklin County craftsman Abraham Lincoln Gusler, who previously was best known for his talent in making parts for moonshine stills.
“One thing about them is that they’re innovative,” Webb says.
“When they see something different, they often get that inspiration – `I wonder if I can do that?’ “
Surprisingly, the Blue Ridge’s long instrument-making tradition not only has survived but flourished in the face of competition from other sources.
By 1900, for example, virtually every instrument except the dulcimer could be purchased from Sears and other mail-order catalogs for as little as $3. Local artisans responded by making more fiddles and banjos and expanding their repertoire to include the guitar, the mandolin and the autoharp, Webb says.
The guitar and the mandolin, in particular, quickly found favor with the region’s old-time string bands, helping to shape the development of what would later become known as the bluegrass sound.
Both kinds of music went on to draw increasingly larger audiences with the advent of phonograph recordings and radio, Webb says.
When commercial broadcasting began in Roanoke in the early 1920s, one station opened its first show with two local musicians playing “Turkey in the Straw,” a traditional Blue Ridge favorite.
Not long afterward, a popular local band called Al Hopkins and the Hillbillies became a national recording sensation, lending their name to a kind of music the rest of the country hadn’t heard before.
Those successes were followed by the founding of the Galax Old Fiddlers Convention and Whitetop Music Festival, both of which began encouraging Blue Ridge instrument making as well as music back in the mid-1930s. The top two winners of the first Galax dulcimer-playing competition, in fact, belonged to a family that had produced the region’s premier dulcimer makers for several generations.
Music scholars have added to the attention over the years, coming to collect tunes and instruments from the region in increasing numbers since the early 20th century. In the 1960s, a folk music revival led to another wave of admirers, including such well-known musicians as Pete Seeger and Mike Seeger.
Today, the old-time, string-band tradition continues to be stronger in the western Virginia Blue Ridge than any other part of the country.
That’s kept dozens of music-minded mail carriers, machinists, carpenters, railroad men, shopkeepers and other people busy making instruments in their spare time.
“All that attention has helped strengthen the instrument-making tradition because it made it into something that really mattered,” Webb says.
“They’re certainly not in it for the money. They could make more getting a second job at a 7-Eleven store.”
* “Blue Ridge Folk Instruments and Their Makers” runs through Sept. 6 at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. daily. South England Street, Williamsburg. $6. 220-7698
