“I like to joke that I have plenty of firewood here,” he said, laughing. “In case I need it.”
I laughed with him, feeling that uneasy and humorous tension between just plain old wood and wood made special by its destination as a musical instrument. He picked up a plank of smooth curly red maple and showed it to me.
“This is my most valuable wood,” he said. “See the knots, the design in that wood? It comes from struggle, from fighting the elements. Curly wood is wood with a defect, wood that’s had to suffer to get where it is. It’s beautiful wood, ain’t it? It’s what I make the backs from.”
I looked at the wood, admiring its random designs and patterns drawn from struggle and hardship.
The workshop had screened windows looking out over tall, green vines and bushes, and a workbench and a stool that stood like a throne in the middle of an ordered chaos. Items filled every possible space on the workbench: a blue drill, pieces of wood, a vice, wood-handled scrapers and knives, scroll-shaped metal templates, a white ceramic mortar and pestle, a can of WD-40, a box of Band-Aids, halved plastic milk cartons filled with mysterious brown substances, a hot plate with a pan holding an old jar and a wooden spoon. On the wall hung rolls of tape, funnels, filters. An unvarnished violin dangled from the ceiling beneath skylights. In the midst of the cacophony of tools and wood wafted a complicated smell made up of varnish, dust, and the sharp, sweet scent of raw wood.
“The sound of the fiddle, it all has to do with the wood that it’s made from,” he explained. “The cells, the sap tubes, they all create the instrument’s voice. My method, which is secret, keeps those sap tubes open so they can transmit and amplify the music.”
I nodded, thinking as he talked about how intimately connected to the natural world was the violin. The wood, the horsehair bow, the rosin made from the sap of trees, the catgut traditionally used in the strings: all of it is drawn directly from the wilderness.
“This is my sanity here,” he said, sweeping his arms and eyes across his shop. At first glance it looked like any other cluttered wood shop, with its saws and tools and dust. But as my eyes adjusted to the light streaming in through the Plexiglas skylights, I looked closely and saw a half-carved scroll among the tools, a nearly complete violin hanging above me, and more diagrams and books about violin design scattered on a nearby table.
He joked that his wife Ilene threatened to clean up his mess, but he said in fact he knew exactly where everything was.
“See, I got a place for everything,” he said, picking up a wood gouge and putting it on the shelf. “This goes here, and this goes right there.”
He sat on the stool, looking slightly flustered in the midst of his tools, as if he weren’t sure where to begin.
Conner picked up a piece of red maple carved into the rough shape of the back of a violin and showed me how he whittled away the sides, the middle, measuring it as he went to see that his thicknesses are correct. We went through his shop like this, jumping from step to step, sometimes forward, sometimes backward. He had too much to tell me and not enough time. As he talked, I tried to piece together how he made fiddles from start to finish.
He said he begins with lengths of red maple and spruce, which he whittles down into rough fiddle shapes: the front, with its f-holes; the back, with its many different thicknesses to help channel the sound; the sides; the neck. He makes the back and sides and neck from curly maple, which gives the instrument the typical flared finish. The top is made from spruce, and the finger board and pegs are made from ebony.
Since he was a young boy, Conner said, he had honed his skills as a woodcarver, whittling pieces of wood with a little pocket-knife into tops, guns, gravel-shooters, and other toys. His mom died when he was ten years old, and his father didn’t earn much money, so if young Arthur wanted toys, he had to make them. Now he uses those skills to carve the wood of fiddles. He focuses much of his artistic efforts on the scroll, which often becomes his trademark ram or cougar head. He assembles the pieces, shaping them and gluing them together, adding the fingerboard and pegs. After he finishes the body of the violin, he coats the instrument with a mixture of borax and lye, which he makes by running water through ashes in an upside down plastic container on his wall. He learned about this mixture from The Secrets of Stradivari, and he told me that it kills any bugs that threaten to eat the wood and cleans out the sap from the wood tubes—giving the violin its resonance.
Conner then coats the wood with tempera, a sealant made from egg whites, and varnishes it with a homemade mixture made from bee propolis, a substance produced by bees to seal their hives. According to The Secrets of Stradivari, this same substance was used by early Italian violin makers to seal the wood. Popular stories regarding Stradivarius violins suggest that their exquisite sound comes in part from his secret varnish formula. Although some scientific analysis of the varnish on Stradivarius violins has indicated that it’s not much different from basic furniture varnishes of the time, the stories have real power for violinists and violin makers alike. Conner was thus particularly proud of his special propolis varnish recipe, which his beekeeping neighbor, Danny, made for him. Danny’s a chemist by profession, and he created a secret recipe just for Conner, mixing the sticky substance bees produce to seal their wooden hives with other chemicals. Conner said that he didn’t know the precise ingredients in this mixture, but he trusted Danny’s recipe.
“What’s in it, besides bee propolis?” I asked.
He eyed me carefully. “Think you could tell if you smelled it?”
I shrugged. “I guess I’d have to try.”
He unplugged a small glass container holding dark brownish green liquid, and let me smell. I said it smelled like bees-wax, and mint, and wood sap, and maybe turpentine. It smelled like something else that I didn’t tell him, though. Somehow, it smelled faintly like the Blue Ridge Mountains.
As the late afternoon light stretched across the green hills and woods, we went back to his house.
“Thanks so much for your time,” I said.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere yet.”
He pulled out a case containing a set of his fiddles, one with five strings, and one with four. He handed me the four-string and took the five-string himself.
“It’s time to play some fiddle,” he said, smiling. “Show me what you can do.”
Once again I froze, trying to remember some of the songs I’d been learning. I started playing a halfhearted rendition of “Ida Red,” with its simple droning double-stops that I’d started learning with Angela.
Conner shook his head.
“I see you’re trying to play old-time fiddle,” he said. “But you know, that’s not the way it’s done. It’s all in the timing. And the foot tapping. Can you tap your foot?”
As I began to tap, he belted out a soft and fast old-time version of a folk tune called “Eighth of January,” which he said was about the Battle of New Orleans. He bowed in quick motions, back and forth, in a distinctive old-time way that I’d heard on recordings but couldn’t quite figure out how to imitate. I tried to play along, but my tone sounded all wrong, too melodic, like the tone of a classical violinist. As he played the tune over and over, though, I began to get the hang of it a little, began to sense how the notes fit together in a pattern unlike any classical violin piece, began to understand how to make the continual droning sound of old-time fiddle without simply sounding weak. He was right; it was all in the timing, and in the foot tapping. It might have had something to do with the way he held the bow and the instrument, too, though I couldn’t quite tell. He played a few other songs, such as “Alabama Girls” and “Rabbit Sittin’ in the Cornfence,” as well as a strange version of “Greensleeves” that was, as best as I could tell, in C major. Mostly, I listened, trying to join in as I could.
“Well, you keep practicing,”