Fiddler Mark O’Connor: An American music story

Discover more Featured Stories like this in The Strad Playing Hub.

Read more premium content for subscribers here

It sounds like a great American tall tale: a young boy infatuated with fiddle music is handed an unsightly white fiddle that had once been a stringless, bridgeless piece of decoration on a barn wall. The instrument is a freak of nature with an unbelievable resonance, and the boy goes on to win just about every fiddle competition, break every record and become one of the most influential musicians in the American tradition. You’d be forgiven for assuming that somewhere along the line a contract had been drafted and the boy was down one soul.

But this isn’t a retelling of The Devil Went Down to Georgia. It is the very real but equally extraordinary story of the American fiddle legend Mark O’Connor, as presented in his recently published autobiography, Crossing Bridges. It’s a hefty book, running at well over four hundred pages yet only outlining his life between the ages of 8 and 21. It is a bona fide fiddle hero’s journey, the story of a kid who dedicated himself to the American fiddle tradition both for the love of the music and as a refuge from the knocks of life. It’s also a rich, detailed dive into the tradition, the music and its key players.

’Any talented child musician is thrust right into classical music training. American roots music has always historically been an old man’s environment’

Chatting with me on Zoom from his North Carolina home, O’Connor admits that he always knew that his journey was a story that needed to be told, but he struggled to get the book off the ground. After starting and stopping several times over the years, it was the pandemic that helped give him the final push. As the lockdowns hit, he and his fellow fiddle-toting wife, Maggie, started streaming live concerts from their living room every Monday. ‘We thought that those would go on for about a couple of months and then maybe things would get back to normal. Well, they kept going, and we did 70 Mondays in a row without missing a single one. As you can imagine, we started to struggle to fill the hour with enough new material. So I began carving out a segment where I would talk about my old days in music, principally my young years, and I started getting comments from the subscribers saying, “Mark, you’ve got to write these stories down.”’

And the book is full of these amusing anecdotes, from how he came to own that mythic white fiddle to how he once scurried off stage mid-performance to get an autograph from Yehudi Menuhin, who was sitting in the audience. His story begins when as an eight-year-old he caught a performance by Doug Kershaw on The Johnny Cash Show and became infatuated with the fiddle. Having already started playing music on the classical guitar, he begged his parents for a fiddle for three years – and even went so far as to make his own instrument out of cardboard and coloured with crayons, which for obvious reasons didn’t hold up under the guitar strings he attempted to use.

Finally, his mother bought him a fiddle when he was eleven, and he was off. Soon, he had attracted the attention of Texas fiddler Benny Thomasson, who took him under his wing. ‘For two years, I got the foundation of American music from an authentic legend teaching me how to play in a way that honours his tradition,’ O’Connor says. Sometimes Thomasson would spend a whole weekend teaching O’Connor tunes and was already asking him to come up with his own variations. ‘In the very beginning, I was living Benny’s life. But very soon he turned it back to me. That was the genius of what he did. He realised I had this creative, rebellious bent, that I was determined to be an individual – and he fed that. By the time I was twelve, almost no one could tell that he was my teacher because every fiddle tune I played was my own rendition.’

O’Connor went on to wow the American roots scene. He was virtually sweeping the board across all the national fiddle contests, starting in the junior categories but quickly up (and winning) against established old-timers as a teenager, and earning quite a few ‘youngest’ records – the youngest National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest junior division winner (aged 12), the youngest artist ever to sign to Rounder Records (12), the youngest Grand Master Fiddler Champion (13), the youngest competitor (16) and winner (17) of the ‘grand champion’ (open) division of the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest.

These accomplishments may appear much less impressive to the classical violin world, where child prodigies are a dime a dozen, but they were simply unheard of in the roots scene. So why don’t we see more folk wunderkinder? ‘The easiest answer is that any talented child musician is thrust right into classical music training,’ explains O’Connor, before adding, ‘Classical music has a history of really great pedagogy. We’ve got centuries of established teaching traditions. The other reason is that American roots music has always historically been an old man’s environment.’ He makes this point clear in his book when he says that not only were so many of the competitions dominated by ‘men with long grey beards’ but also some even refused to allow a young’un to enter. ‘Nowhere in this environment was a child going toe to toe with these people in the competitions,’ he smiles – ‘until I did it.’

’When people from Europe came carrying their violin under their arm as immigrants it was immediately a shared instrument’

Folk music is based on the experience of living life. ‘In many cases, it would take many years to establish an authenticity in your music, to have something to say.’ But Thomasson passed his wealth of lived experience down to a young O’Connor. ‘He shaped my universe into an authentic fiddler’s.’

On the evidence of his autobiography, it’s hard to imagine anyone who knows the American fiddle tradition better than O’Connor. And as we chat, it’s clear he could easily talk for hours – and we do – about the music’s history.

He starts his discussion with an anecdote. ‘When I first got together with Yo-Yo Ma…’ – that was at Stéphane Grappelli’s 80th birthday celebration in 1988 at Carnegie Hall, New York, when O’Connor was 26. They played in two different parts of the concert, but Ma was impressed with what Grappelli and Mark could do on the violin. ‘A few years later, he came down to visit me in Nashville. There wasn’t any intended project or gig. He was just really curious, so we stood in my kitchen before we even got our instruments out of the cases and we just talked for about three hours. He was asking me questions about the history of this music. And I was telling him where it came from.’ O’Connor explained to Ma how all these different cultures had diverged in the US, exchanging ideas and creating a multiplicity of American music styles. ‘And then Yo-Yo asked me this really wild question: “Is it important?” That just blew me away. I turned to him and said, ‘It might be the most important thing in music history because it’s impacted the world like no other music has in the last 150 years. If you think that the last 150 years is important, American music has been right there.’

O’Connor explains to me a significant difference between the role of the violin in American folk music and its role in European folk music. ‘In Europe, the modern violin had to adapt to Celtic folk music, for example, which was already established long before. So the job of the modern violin was to emulate the whistles, flutes and pipes.’ Even the ornamentation in the fiddle music was simply an adaptation of whistle ornamentation. ‘In the American scene, when people from Europe came carrying their violin under their arm as immigrants it was immediately a shared instrument. It was shared with Native Americans. It was shared with African Americans. And this acted as a depository for a new-found American musical culture, and the fiddle itself became the vehicle for American music to develop.’

But this newly synthesised music rubbed the classical institution the wrong way. ‘Classical musicians in the States have historically snubbed fiddle playing. It wasn’t just the style of music that was part of the division. It was classism, racism. It was city people versus rural people. The violin and the fiddle established these culture wars right from the beginning, four hundred years ago. American fiddle music represented communities coming together, no matter how disparate they are. They were really telling this great American musical story that was one for the ages.’

O’Connor is glad to see that this divide is finally starting to break down. Another story emerges: ‘I’ll tell you about a fascinating journey just within the last 25 years or so.’ In 1996 he released the album Appalachia Waltz (above) on Sony Classical with Ma and double bassist Edgar Meyer. It was hugely successful, and the title track topped the classical charts for about a year. ‘It went beyond anybody’s imagination, including ours.’ But not everyone was so thrilled about the success. ‘Every other classical music label called for it to be brought down off the chart because it wasn’t classical music. We were barred from the Grammys. We weren’t even allowed to be nominated.’ There was no category deemed appropriate. ‘Here was a recording charted at number one for around a year, and there was no place at the Grammys for that.’ A couple of years later the Grammys established the Best Classical Crossover Album category, which accommodated the trio’s second, chart-topping album, Appalachian Journey, in 2000, only to be ditched again in 2012.

’I was able to kind of elbow my way through some of the establishment because I could compose for a symphony orchestra’

‘In 2019, a fantastic new violinist on the scene, Tessa Lark, was nominated for her recording of what was termed a bluegrass concerto,’ says O’Connor. He’s referring here to a contender in the Best Classical Instrumental Solo category. ‘It lost to Nicola Benedetti’s recording of a jazz violin concerto written by Wynton Marsalis. So we’ve gone from 1996, when we were banned and asked by every other label to be removed off the chart, and ended up with at least two entries that are not strictly classical. You’ve got to shake your head.’

He feels proud to have been part of that change. As the title of his book suggests, he’s been able to bridge these disparate worlds and help inspire a new 21st-century meeting of American musics – from roots and country to jazz and classical. Considering how he was able to do this, he says, ‘Maybe it was my specific biography, where I started improvising and composing very early. I was one of the first ones to do it so young in American string playing – maybe it just gave me the platform. I was kind of able to elbow my way through some of the Establishment because I could compose for a symphony orchestra.’

His list of classical compositions is almost as impressive as his 45-strong discography. Johnny Appleseed Suite (1994) and Americana Symphony (2006) are among his orchestral pieces; there are string quartets, piano trios and several concertos including his Fiddle Concerto (1992–3), Double Violin Concerto (1997) and, certainly the most impressive of the bunch, The Improvised Violin Concerto (2010). ‘It’s nearly 40 minutes long, in five movements. There’s not one bar that is written down for me to play. It’s completely made up.’ As a rigidly classical musician without a single improvisational bone in my body, I ask how that is even possible. He laughs, ‘There’s enough orchestration and development of the themes that the music stands on its own,’ and he admits that he does have to use a harmony chart to keep track of all the changes across the movements. The orchestral score hasn’t been published yet, and I wonder if he’ll ever make it available to other violinists. ‘My challenge to other players is to write their own improvised concerto’ – he offers a charming smile. Of course, ’tis so simple.

I joke, but O’Connor is very serious that these are skills that can – and ought to – be cultivated in classical pedagogy. And in fact, that is why he spent years developing what he calls the O’Connor Method, an approach to string teaching based in the American tradition. Beyond the obvious shift in focus from European music to American roots, the method also stresses the importance of teaching both technique and creativity (including improvisation) at the same time from the very beginning, mimicking his own musical upbringing.

His love for American tunes also comes across in the method – there are no Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star throwaways here. Each tune the students learn, starting with the well-known Boil ’em Cabbage Down, is a valuable piece of the tradition. O’Connor still performs many of them today, including on his recent Crossing Bridges tour with Maggie. In fact, Sally Goodin’, passed down to the young O’Connor by Thomasson all those years ago, has become one of his go-to tunes and got a very special performance during the tour. ‘Maggie would bring out the white fiddle at the end of the show. We’d turn off the microphones and I’d play Sally Goodin’ on it at the front of the stage so people could hear how it projects like a Stradivari… it’s so resonant. It’s just a freak-of-nature instrument.’

Whether there’s something supernatural about that mythic white fiddle or not, it has seen O’Connor through a remarkable journey. ‘It’s other people’s story now,’ he says. ‘It started out as a unique story that needed to be told, but now that my book is published, I really do feel it’s other people’s story. It’s an American music story.’

Playing

In The Best of Technique you’ll discover the top playing tips of the world’s leading string players and teachers. It’s packed full of exercises for students, plus examples from the standard repertoire to show you how to integrate the technique into your playing.

Teaching

The Strad’s Masterclass series brings together the finest string players with some of the greatest string works ever written. Always one of our most popular sections, Masterclass has been an invaluable aid to aspiring soloists, chamber musicians and string teachers since the 1990s.

Calendars

This year’s calendar celebrates the top instruments played by members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony, Australian String Quartet and some of the country’s greatest soloists.