Category: Fiddle

Quill Rose, Mountain Fiddler

“He could neither kill a bear, play the fiddle, nor shoot a gun.” 1860

Quill-Rose-on-the-porch

The unknown writer of this disparaging quote apparently was not talking about a mountain man from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee named Quill Rose, who could do all three, and more.

Born Aquilla Rose in Cades Cove, Blount County, Tennessee on May 4, 1841, he died on November 3, 1921 at the ripe old age of eighty. Tall, wiry and broad-shouldered, he had long dark hair and sported a beard. At 6 foot 1½ inches, he was considerably taller than most men at that time.

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Easy Fiddle Tunes

Old-Time Fiddle for the Complete Ignoramus! instruction book by Wayne Erbsen

By Wayne Erbsen

The Internet is abuzz with people wanting to learn to play the fiddle. My guess is that you are one of them! Of course, you want to learn the easiest songs possible. Who wouldn’t?

The songs that are the easiest to play are the tunes you already know. They’re the ones you’ve had in your head for years. So instead of having me teach you a totally unfamiliar tune on the fiddle, let’s get you to learn how to play the tunes you already know.

I suggest you start making lists of your favorite songs. If you

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Fiddlin’ John Carson

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

It wasn’t the popcorn in the New York’s Palace Theater that spring day of 1923 that got Atlanta businessman Polk Brockman thinking. Instead, it was the newsreel he watched of a Virginia fiddler’s convention that made him scribble this note on a piece of paper: “Record Fiddlin’ John Carson.” Seconds before he had reached in his pocket for his pen and something to write on, Brockman recalled why he came to New York on this most recent trip.

As the owner of a number of furniture stores in the Atlanta area, Brockman also sold what were then

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Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

Thunderstruck. What better word to use to describe the reaction of fans of old-time fiddle music when they first tuned into the Grand Ole Opry and heard the fiddling of Arthur Smith coming out of their radios? From the time Smith first stepped up to the WMS  microphone in December 1927, the world of southern fiddling would never be the same again. Who was this man that set fiddling so much on its ear?

Born April 10th, 1898, near Bold Springs, Tennessee, Arthur Smith got his first fiddle when his young wife, Nettie, sold enough chickens to

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Eck Robertson, Master Fiddler

Rural Roots of Bluegrass

By Wayne Erbsen

Eck Robertson was a true fiddle master. Fortunately, he was unafraid to step up to the plate and say so.

The story begins shortly after the turn of the twentieth century when Amarillo, Texas, fiddler Eck Robertson honed his fiddle chops enough to start winning fiddler’s conventions. Competition at Texas fiddle contests was notoriously fierce, and winning any of them was no mean trick. One story has Robertson in a showdown playoff with the father of legendary fiddler Bob Wills. In a last-ditch effort to give himself an edge, legend has it that he broke off a

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The Hanging of Fiddlin’ Joe Coleman

By Wayne Erbsen

The story of the hanging of Fiddlin’ Joe Coleman is enough to send chills up and down your spine. In 1847, near the town of Slate Fork, in Adair County, Kentucky, a shoemaker and fiddler named Joe Coleman was living with his wife, and his wife’s mother and sister. According to some accounts, Joe had been acting erratically and not long after that, someone smothered his mother-in-law to death with a pillow. A few days later, Joe’s wife went into the woods to gather bark and never came back. Joe went searching for his wife in the

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