EMILY KWONG, HOST:
At the Appalachian String Band Music Festival earlier this month, fiddle maker Jean Horner was remembered in a special jam session with all fiddlers playing Horner instruments. Horner died this year at age 91, a self-taught luthier from East Tennessee, who is celebrated for his exceptional fiddles. Reporter Lisa Coffman brings us the story of a man who was inspired by Antonio Stradivari.
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LISA COFFMAN: In 1951,18-year-old Jean Horner was reading in his bunk on a Navy ship, and an advertisement in Popular Mechanics caught his eye - how to build a Stradivarius. I interviewed Horner in 2023, and he remembered the moment.
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JEAN HORNER: When I seen that little book advertised, I just ordered it. They sent it to the ship.
COFFMAN: It was a manual for making a violin designed more than 200 years before by Antonio Stradivari, one of the world's greatest luthiers.
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HORNER: I've always been a great believer in books, and I'd study that thing.
COFFMAN: Horner's interest in fiddles had started a few years before at age 14. He'd found a broken fiddle in his grandfather's cabin in Westel, Tennessee. By the time Horner got that fiddle glued back together, he was hooked. After his stint in the Navy, Horner came home to Westel in 1955, determined to make instruments like the Stradivarius. Problem was, there was no one to teach him. Longtime friend and Grammy-nominated fiddler Kenny Sears says Horner had to rely on books to learn his craft.
KENNY SEARS: Jean was very self-educated. He didn't have a lot of formal education, but he read all the time. And he looked at pictures, and he studied them.
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COFFMAN: And Horner began designing fiddles based on those pictures. He said his first fiddle left a lot to be desired.
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HORNER: It would give you nightmares to look at it (laughter).
SEARS: He just learned it the hard way, and he told me that he burned up a lot of fiddles in his wood stove in the shop. And if they didn't suit him, you know, he'd just make kindling out of them.
COFFMAN: Now is probably the time to explain the difference between a fiddle and a violin. There isn't one - not really. The difference lies in the way you string them, the kind of music you play on them. Or as Horner would say, if I'm selling one to you, it's a violin. Violins cost more. Over time, Horner's painstaking work paid off. His fiddles stopped going in the wood stove.
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HORNER: It took several of them - about 10, I guess - and lo and behold, I made one once. I've got it.
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COFFMAN: Horner was particular about the wood he used. The high-end violin world believed you couldn't make a good violin from American wood. Horner disagreed. He knew the Cumberland Plateau forests and the loggers who worked there. And when their saws buzzed into a piece of curly maple fine enough for a Jean Horner fiddle, they called him. Often, loggers would bring Horner into the forest, says longtime friend, Mike Whitehead (ph).
MIKE WHITEHEAD: He knew the wood from the time it was a living tree until it was a finished instrument.
COFFMAN: Horner made other instruments, mandolins and banjos, even a cello. But in his mind, fiddle was king. By the late 1970s, musicians like Kenny Sears started finding their way to Westel.
SEARS: We decided we'd never seen that many good fiddles in one place in our whole life.
COFFMAN: One striking quality of Horner's fiddles was their balance - clear and bright on the high notes, warm and rich on the low. It's a quality Sears appreciates. He's classically trained. Sears played with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra before his bluegrass career.
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SEARS: You don't get that lower end out of a lot of fiddles, you know?
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SEARS: Usually, when you get the low end is good, the high end is not. To get a balanced fiddle, Jean knew how to do that. And he did it very well.
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COFFMAN: By the 1970s, Horner was making instruments full time. He wasn't getting rich. I make about a cornbread living off this, Horner liked to say. But in the years that followed, he gained recognition. His instruments appeared on stages from the Grand Ole Opry to Carnegie Hall and beyond. In 1986, the Smithsonian featured Horner at their Festival of American Folklife. In 2009, he earned the Governor's Arts Award in Tennessee. Horner kept turning out fiddles, close to 500 in his career, and he stayed as obsessed as ever with Stradivarius violins. Sometimes Horner and his friend Keith Williams, another Tennessee luthier, joked about what they'd do if they could get their hands on a real Stradivarius.
KEITH WILLIAMS: And I said, well, I'd like to play that thing once. What would you like to do, Jean? He said, I'd like to take my pocketknife and take a top off of it (laughter) and see what's in the middle of that thing.
COFFMAN: But here's the thing - during his career, Horner really did get to hold a Stradivarius, just once. And no, he didn't take a pocketknife to it. Around 2005, when Horner was 72, Kenny Sears took him to meet the concertmaster of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. She had a Stradivarius on loan. Sears had brought one of Horner's fiddles, too, and Horner got to hear his fiddle played next to a Stradivarius.
SEARS: And when she played them back-to-back, they sounded the same. And when I played them back-to-back, they sounded the same. So he was making fiddles every bit as good as Stradivari.
COFFMAN: Horner never forgot. Here he is in 2023 after his 90th birthday, in his busy, noisy shop - the last year it was open - still talking about that Stradivarius moment.
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HORNER: I think of it every day how beautiful it was. The craftsmanship was just a perfection that a machine could never get. And all 300 years of patina formed on it - just think of the shiniest thing you can think of, and it would outdo it.
COFFMAN: For NPR News, I'm Lisa Coffman in Westel, Tennessee.
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KWONG: All the tunes you heard in this piece were played on Jean Horner fiddles. This story was produced by Nicole Musgrave. You can hear a longer version of this story on the "Rural Remix" podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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