A question for the hivemind: Who in Los Angeles does good fiddle and bow repair? It’s time I fixed up Charlie Poole’s fiddle and learned how to play.
Here’s a story: Growing up as a child, my Grandma Dickerson had this fiddle that she said was “Charlie Poole’s fiddle.” My dad can fill in some of the details, but here are the basic elements of the story. Old-timey music legend Charlie Poole often played in Floyd, Virginia, where all my family is from. One day Charlie popped into a local diner on Main Street in Floyd and wanted to sell a fiddle for ten dollars. The fiddle was purchased by my great-grandfather Oscar Webb and it remained in the family for generations. It was a very big deal. Charlie Poole died in 1931, and he was as big a star as the old-timey movement ever had.
Since I was the one in the family who caught the music bug, eventually I was gifted Charlie Poole’s fiddle. It has remained in the condition you see in the photo since then: in need of restoration to be playable.
The only problem with this great story: Charlie Poole was a banjo player. He is credited with inventing the three-finger banjo style made popular by every bluegrass musician after him, including Earl Scruggs. But fiddle? Nope. Charlie never played the fiddle.
The best guess I can muster up is that Charlie needed money to buy booze or to get out of town (he was a notorious drinker and hell-raiser, one of the reasons he died at age thirty-nine), and he sold the fiddle belonging to his fiddle player to my great grandpa Oscar Webb (my Granny Dickerson’s father and brothers had a string band called the Webb Brothers in Floyd County back in the 1920s and 1930s). Or, maybe he just had a fiddle for ten minutes, and sold it for booze. Who knows. It could be Posey Rorer’s fiddle (the famous fiddle player of Poole’s North Carolina Ramblers), or it could be someone else’s. It’s just an old fiddle with a great story behind it.
And now I’d like to get it fixed up. It’s time. Who knows a trustworthy violin repair shop in LA? The good news is that all it really needs is to be set up, sound post reset, new strings, new bridge, but it’s not damaged. The original bow needs to be re-haired. Let me know if you have a good suggestion.
