Photos by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Arthur Conner, a longtime fiddlemaker, works on a violin in his workshop earlier this month in Copper Hill. Conner, 85, has made fiddles for the likes of Ricky Skaggs and Gene Elders. He works by the warmth of a woodstove in a cozy shop that he converted from a one-room schoolhouse.

Arthur Conner's fiddles have his signature ram's head carved into the scroll, just above the peg box. The Floyd County craftsman taught himself to build instruments by examining their designs and reading books.

Conner keeps a copy of the book "The 'Secrets' of Stradivari" close by in his Copper Hill workshop.

Pieces of curly maple wood soak in a tub near a woodstove. Soaking the wood makes it pliable and easy to shape into the curvy side pieces of a fiddle.

Fiddlemaking is done almost exclusively by hand in Conner's workshop. He fastens the side pieces onto a pattern using pegs and twine that will hold the pieces in shape until they dry and can be fitted with the instrument's top and back.

Photos by KYLE GREEN The Roanoke Times

Arthur Conner, a longtime fiddlemaker, works on a violin in his workshop earlier this month in Copper Hill. Conner, 85, has made fiddles for the likes of Ricky Skaggs and Gene Elders. He works by the warmth of a woodstove in a cozy shop that he converted from a one-room schoolhouse.

Taking a piece of wood down to size.

In addition to using modern drill presses and band saws, Conner builds musical instruments with chisels and wood rasps he made himself.

Arthur Conner had been making fiddles for years before he ever tried playing one. Conner began repairing instruments for local musicians about 1965 and made his first instrument — a mandolin — for one of his sons. He started making fiddles because of their popularity in the stringbands of Southwest Virginia.

COPPER HILL -- Arthur Conner took a fiddle down from a pine-paneled wall and cradled it in both hands like a baby.

"Ricky Skaggs played this a right smart of a while," he said as he plucked the instrument's strings with his thumb.

The fiddle gleamed with the colors of a sunset -- reds and oranges emanating from a body of maple and mountain spruce. Conner doesn't have to explain how he ended up with a fiddle that once belonged to a country music superstar. He built it for Skaggs more than three decades ago. He took it back to do some work on it and kept it.

By his own reckoning, Conner has built nearly 100 fiddles in the basement of his Floyd County home and in a sawdust-coated workshop next to it. In 45 years of instrumentmaking, Conner has produced fiddles so fine, they have been played by the country's top musicians on the recordings of major stars.

George Strait, Lyle Lovett, Joan Baez, Ricky Skaggs and Lucinda Williams are among those whose works have featured an Arthur Conner instrument. That means millions of music lovers worldwide have heard Conner's music, even though many folks in the county where he's lived most of his 85 years don't know he's one of the most sought-after fiddle builders around.

That might be changing, as a series of music projects aim to bring the spotlight to a true craftsman who prefers his privacy. Conner and his work will be featured in a documentary, two CDs and a regional concert tour, all slated to debut this spring and summer.

In a region known for its mountain music, but where fiddlemakers are rarely as well-known as fiddle players, Conner is revered as one of the masters of the music scene.

"All of this attention is well-deserved," said Mike Mitchell, a Floyd-based musician and teacher who has known Conner for a decade. "I love the guy."

Making of a craftsman

A local elementary school teacher once asked Conner if he had "about 30 minutes" to speak to her students about fiddlemaking, a process that takes weeks and often months to produce one instrument.

So, Conner sat before the students and instructed them, "To make a fiddle, you take a piece of wood and cut off what ain't fiddle."

'Nuff said.

The fact is, Conner could talk about fiddlemaking for hours. He's the type of guy who will tell you a five-minute story about a wood vise, whether you care about such a thing or not, or take a 10-minute sidetrack to recall a bear hunt that happened 50 years ago. He is a born storyteller and his stories are good ones. Especially about his early years in the backwoods of Floyd County.

"My daddy had a wind-up Victrola he ordered from Sears and Roebuck or the Montgomery Ward catalog," he said one morning at his kitchen table. "The first thing he looked at in them catalogs was records. Bill Monroe came on the scene and we'd play his records. Sometimes there'd be a little moonshine and daddy'd wind up that Victrola and play till daylight."

Conner's father, George, was a farmer and cobbler who played a little clawhammer-style banjo. Conner, despite becoming a renowned fiddlemaker, did not actually try to play a fiddle until about five years ago.

"People who tell you you can't play unless you start at 5 or 6 years old don't know what they're talking about," he said.

Even as a freckle-faced boy, the oldest of George and Mary Della Conner's three surviving children (a brother died as a baby), Conner was a builder and a whittler who carved little guns out of blocks of wood for his pals. He had a mind for design, even though his schooling ended after the seventh grade.

He left home at age 14, basically because he was too big to be whipped.

"My daddy came at me with a willow sprout and I grabbed it and I broke it," he said. "I said, 'You ain't whipping my so-and-so anymore.' He said, 'Well, you'll have to leave.' So I did."

He lived with a neighboring sharecropper family for a while, earning his keep partly by trapping animals and selling hides. ("I'd get three dollars and a half for a skunk," he said. "I sold a many of 'em to Frank E. Brown on Campbell Avenue.")

At about 16, he traveled to Norfolk to train as a machinist and welder under the New Deal's National Youth Administration. When World War II broke out, he joined an Army engineering battalion and was sent to electronics training. Near the end of the war, he drove a truck hauling gasoline over the Burma Road.

"I had 18 drums of gas followed by a trailer of mortar shells," he said. "I'd just learned how to pull up and back up the week before."

Upon returning home, he went to work for the railroad, got married and raised a family of three sons and four daughters. His first wife of 57 years, Bonnie, died in 2005. He and his second wife, Eileen, live in the house he built in 1958.

Back in the 1960s, a funny thing happened. His boys formed a top-notch bluegrass band. And they needed instruments.

Hitting the big-time

"What in the hell are you doing?" Conner's brother-in-law demanded to know.

"I'm making a fiddle," Conner replied.

"Aw, you can't make a fiddle," his in-law said.

Conner reflected on that conversation some 45 years and 100 fiddles later.

"You know how I quit smoking?" he asked rhetorically. "A guy told me I couldn't quit. A fella tells you you can't do something is doing something for you even if you don't realize it."

About 1965, Conner was mostly repairing instruments for local players. Then, he made a mandolin for one of his sons. He started making fiddles because of their popularity in the stringbands of Southwest Virginia, teaching himself to build instruments simply by examining their designs and by reading books.

Along the way, however, Conner began studying the great violinmakers of old. A brief music lesson: A fiddle is a violin. "Fiddle" is more of a colloquial term that usually applies to the instrument when it's used for folk-music styles. But, generally speaking, a fiddle is a violin is a fiddle.

Most modern violin designs are inspired by the 16th- and 17th-century master builders of Cremona, Italy, including the Amati and Guarneri families, and especially the great Antonio Stradivari. Conner came to favor the Guarneri style, known for deep, loud tones.

Conner made fiddles for his family and eventually began commanding top dollar -- make that about $2,000 -- from the public for his instruments. He hit the big time in the mid-1970s when Skaggs, who then traveled through Southwest Virginia frequently with bluegrass bands, asked Conner to build him a fiddle with five strings (usually, they have only four).

About 1978, Conner met Roanoke-based musician Gene Elders during a recording session at Crush Studios on Elm Avenue. Elders also wanted a five-string fiddle, which Conner eventually built after some initial reluctance. (Conner likes to work at his own pace and build instruments when he wants to.)

Elders wanted a five-string because the extra string would give him a wider range of notes to play, from high and keening to low and mellow.

"It's basically a cross between a violin and a viola," Elders said. "That's the instrument I still have today."

Elders has played the Conner-built five-string with some of country and folk music's giants. He is the regular fiddle player for George Strait and Lyle Lovett when they tour and record. When he plays with them, it's an Arthur Conner fiddle you're hearing.

"The fiddle players I know, usually they have a different instrument every time I see them," Elders said. Not him.

Elders hasn't spoken to Conner in years, but said "he speaks to me every day with his fiddle."

Still making music

In addition to their deep tones, Conner's fiddles are known for their ability to stay in tune, even during the heat and humidity of bluegrass festival season.

They're big, tough mountain fiddles, often topped with a signature artistic flourish -- a ram's head carved into the scroll above the tuning pegs. Elders suggested that touch after seeing a photo in National Geographic.

His scrolls display the attention to detail that made Conner's instruments so sought after. Even at age 85, Conner is still learning. Inside the old-timey, one-room schoolhouse he converted into a workshop, a pair of books lie alongside the wood chips, machinery, tools and instrument patterns -- "The Violin-Makers of the Guarneri Family (1626-1762)" and "The 'Secrets' of Stradivari."

"We can put a man on the moon, but we can't copy the older violins," he said.

A couple of instruments sat in various stages of progress. Side pieces of curly maple wood soaked in a tub of water. Conner heated them and bent them into shape, then tied them in place on a wooden body pattern. Another fiddle had begun.

Conner said when he used to set his mind to the task, he could build a fiddle in about two weeks. He preferred Cheat Mountain spruce in West Virginia for the tops, and he used to harvest his own maple for the backs. He built the instruments with tools that ranged from electric band saws and drill presses to handmade chisels.

Several of his fiddles are for sale at Mitchell's music store in downtown Floyd. Even though he has a couple of instruments in the works, he said he has no real motivation to finish them anytime soon.

"I've got a dozen or more," he said. "No use making them and hanging them on a wall."

Jefferson event honors Conner

The first time Mike Mitchell met Arthur Conner, the master fiddlemaker liked Mitchell's playing so much he gave him an instrument.

Well, loaned it, actually.

When Mitchell took a break from touring a few years ago, Conner asked for the five-string violin to be returned so he could pass it along to Buena Vista fiddler Chris Sexton.

"So Chris Sexton's five-string violin used to be Mike Mitchell's five-string violin," Mitchell said mournfully.

But the two men are still close friends, and Mitchell, who also runs the Floyd Music School, has recorded two CDs featuring Conner's instruments.

"Classics on Conner" features Mitchell and an ensemble of regional musicians playing favorite classical pieces on Conner-built stringed instruments that include violins, mandolin and cello. "Dead Center" is a mostly bluegrass album chock-full of -- what else? -- fiddle tunes. Mitchell is planning a regional tour in support of the CDs, called "Classical Grass," which will kick off at Jefferson Center on July 15.

One of the players who will join Mitchell during the concert will be Roanoke musician Jeff Midkiff, who still plays the Conner-made mandolin he got in 1974 when he was 11 years old.

"My father paid $500 for it when we were at the Galax fiddlers' convention," said Midkiff, who played it on recordings for the Lonesome River Band, the McPeak Brothers and others.

"I even played Mahler's 8th Symphony on it with the Milwaukee Symphony."

Another Conner-inspired project is a yet-to-be-completed documentary being edited by Floyd County artist Amy Adams. An eight-minute clip of the documentary, titled "Arthur Conner: Unlocking the Secrets of the Strad," will be shown March 27 at the Floyd Country Store during the music and film event "Music from the Crooked Road."