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Stradivari in the Cumberlands: A Requiem [1]
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Date: 2025-06-06
This story takes you to Westel, Tennessee, home to the fiddle maker Jean Horner. For more than seventy years, Horner built instruments that traveled across the country—Carnegie Hall to California, the Grand Ole Opry to the Smithsonian.
Two factors shaped Horner’s fiddles: his deep roots in the Cumberland Plateau, and his fascination with great Italian violin makers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Horner died this past January at age 91, an acknowledged master of his craft. Reporter Lisa Coffman interviewed Horner at his workshop in 2023. Recently, she attended his memorial gathering in Westel, and brings this remembrance.
How to Build a Stradivarius
In 1951, Jean Horner arrived in Washington, DC. He was eighteen, on leave from the Navy, and headed to his first museum, ever. He’d come for fiddles.
“From the train station, you could see the Smithsonian,” Horner said in a 2023 interview. “And I went over to look at fiddles, and, boy, they got ‘em there.”
Horner’s obsession with fiddles had started at age fourteen. He’d found a broken fiddle in his grandfather’s log cabin in Westel—the cabin where Horner, and his father before him, were born. By the time Horner got that fiddle glued back together, he was hooked. Four years later, he hoped the Smithsonian could help him figure out how good fiddles were made.
The cabin where Horner was born. (Photo by Lynn Dudenbostel)
Awed by the Smithsonian exhibit, Horner realized he needed more than instruments in a display case to help him learn.
“I didn’t know enough,” Horner said . “I was looking at a forest, but I couldn’t see the trees.”
Months later, Horner was reading Popular Mechanics in his bunk on his Navy ship, when an advertisement in the magazine caught his eye: “How to Build a Stradivarius.” He could order a manual for making a violin designed more than two hundred years before by Antonio Stradivari, one of the world’s greatest luthiers.
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 later say, “If I’m selling one to you, it’s a violin. Violins cost more.” In 1951, that Stradivarius manual offered details of fiddle making he’d hungered to understand.
“I’ve always been a great believer in books,” Horner said. “And when I seen that little book advertised, I just ordered it. They sent it to the ship. And I’d study that thing.”
Making a Living in Westel
After the Navy, Horner came home to Westel, determined to make fiddles like the ones in the manual. The problem was, he had no one to teach him. He dreamed of studying at Ecole De Lutherie, the famous national luthier school in Mirecourt, France, that he’d read about. But there was no hope of that—not, as Horner liked to say, for a boy from the hills of Westel.
Hand-carved Horner fiddle. The back is flamed maple. (Photo by Mike Whitehead)
So, Horner kept reading. He read every book he could get his hands on about great European luthiers from centuries before. It was Italian masters who inspired Horner the most—especially Stradivari and his lesser-known contemporary Guiseppe Guarneri. Horner pored over the details of their violins.
Longtime friend and Grammy-winning fiddle player Kenny Sears said Horner had to rely on illustrations to learn his craft.
“Jean was very self-educated,” Sears said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “He didn’t have a lot of formal education, but he read all the time and he looked at pictures and he studied them.”
Fiddle molds in Horner’s shop based on Stradivari and Guarneri designs. (Photo by Lynn Dudenbostel)
Horner began designing fiddles based on those pictures. He made his first fiddle the year he got out of the Navy. He said it left a lot to be desired.
“It would give you nightmares to look at,” Horner said. “But I was learning.”
Horner had to learn the hard way, according to Sears. And even early on, Horner had high expectations of his own work.
“He told me that he burned up a lot of fiddles in his wood stove in the shop,” Sears said. “If they didn’t suit him, he’d just make kindling out of them.”
Making a living was tough in Westel, and Horner and his wife Anne had three children to raise. To pay the bills, Anne Horner worked at a sewing factory in another town. Jean Horner put in twelve-hour days making cabinets and doing any other carpentry that would pay. On the side, he studied fiddles. Horner’s son Bruce recalled what a long shot it was for his father to earn a living making fiddles.
“Somebody making a fiddle in Westel? That’s about as far out a thing as you can imagine around here,” Bruce said. “Usually, to make a living, they left. He did the opposite.”
Horner kept at it. He had no mentor or money to back him, so he had to improvise. Near that log cabin where he’d discovered his first fiddle, Horner built his own workshop out of wood from an abandoned hotel that he’d bought and demolished. He made his own luthier tools—gouges and finger planes and chisels.
Horner’s handmade tools. (Photo by Lynn Dudenbostel) Carved fiddle pegs. (Photo by Lynn Dudenbostel)
“That’s what kind of man he was,” Bruce said. “You don’t need money. You just need to be able to make something yourself.”
In between building cabinets, Horner taught himself the ins and outs of fiddle making. He learned to carve scrolls and tuning pegs, all the delicate arching of a fiddle body. The work was not just demanding—it was unforgiving, Sears said.
“There must be a thousand things that has to be done to make a fiddle,” Sears said, “from splitting the log to varnishing and rubbing it out. And if you just get one of them wrong, it ruins the whole thing.”
In time, Horner’s hard work paid off. After about a dozen fiddles, Horner finished one up to his standards.
“It was one of the best I ever made, for sound,” he said. He sold it for one hundred dollars. It was worth far more, but Horner had bills to pay.
Closeup of tailpiece with inlaid mother of pearl. Edging is handmade “rope” binding of holly and ebony. (Photo by Lynn Dudenbostel)
Another Horner grace note: black walnut perfling, hand carved and inlaid. (Photo by Lynn Dudenbostel)
So Many Good Fiddles in One Place
For his fiddles, Horner was particular about the wood he used. The high-end violin world believed that 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.
“He had friends who would stop the sawmill operation long enough to roll that log off and move on to another one and call Jean,” said Mike Whitehead, another longtime friend.
Sometimes, loggers would bring Horner into the forest to see a special tree they’d found.
“He knew the wood from the time it was a living tree until it was a finished instrument,” Whitehead said.
Horner at the woodpile. (Photo by Mike Whitehead)
Horner made other instruments—mandolins and banjos, even a cello. But in his mind, fiddle was king. Word got out about how good his fiddles were. Professional musicians started finding their way to Westel.
Sears remembered his first sight of the shop. He came with a former bandmate, and they were awed by all the fiddles.
“We started tuning them up and we’d play,” Sears said. “And we decided we’d never seen that many good fiddles in one place in our whole life.”
One striking quality of Horner’s fiddles was their balance: clear and bright on the high notes, warm and rich on the low—the perfect balance. It’s a quality Sears appreciates. He’s classically trained; he played with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra before his bluegrass career.
“Usually when the low end is good, the high end is not,” Sears said. “To get a balanced fiddle—Jean knew how to do that. And he did it very well.”
By the 1970s Horner was finally 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.
In Horner’s mind, the fiddle was the king of instruments. (Photo by Lynn Dudenbostel)
Professionals toured with his instruments across the country and around the world. Horner became a staple artist at Dollywood’s annual October Harvest Festival. And three decades after he saw that fine violin collection in the Smithsonian, Horner made it back to the museum himself—demonstrating his craft during their 1986 Festival of American Folklife. In 2009, he earned the Tennessee Governor’s Arts Award.
Horner didn’t slow down. At age 79, he built more instruments than he had in any other year. He estimated he turned out somewhere between 200 and 500 fiddles across his career. Horner never really kept count. He just kept making fiddles.
Then in 2022, a major blow came. Horner lost his wife Anne, who’d supported his dream of making fine instruments all those years. Two years later, Horner’s health began to fail. He died in January 2025, at a veterans’ home in Knoxville.
Remembering Horner
That spring, as forsythia and redbuds bloomed in Westel, close friends gathered for a memorial at Horner’s shop
They came for one last round of music together and to share stories of a man who changed their lives. They knew Horner as a master luthier and also a generous teacher.
Grand Master Old Time Fiddle Champion Austin Derryberry playing in Horner’s shop. (Photo by Lynn Dudenbostel)
Two of Horner’s apprentices, musicians Casy Meikel and Austin Derryberry, recalled their first visit to the shop.
“I had heard of Jean before,” Meikel said. “I hadn’t met him, though. And so walking in here, it was just like walking into this magical land.”
“Stepping in here was the spark to understand that people did this kind of thing for a living,” Derryberry said.
Over the next year, Horner taught both of them fiddle making. They still laugh about a particular piece of advice he gave them.
“He said the first ten or twenty that you make, you should probably just throw in the fire,” Derryberry said. “He said, ‘after that you’ll be getting somewhere.’”
Teddy Sherrill and Horner in the shop. (Photo by Teddy Sherrill)
Derryberry went on to win the national Grand Master Old Time Fiddling Championship. And he built more fiddles with Horner through the Tennessee Arts Commission’s Traditional Arts Apprentice Program. Derryberry recalled being amazed at how, after almost seventy years of making fiddles, Horner’s love of the craft never waned.
“I think his body was obviously here, but his mind was always somewhere else,” Derryberry said. “He was always thinking of the next fiddle. And still would come out here every single day and never get tired of doing the exact same thing over and over. That’s pure love right there.”
Nodding in time to the memorial’s pickup band, former truck driver Teddy Sherrill described how, after a few visits to Horner’s shop, “I had done been bit by the fiddle bug.”
Sherrill became Horner’s last official student through the state’s Traditional Arts Apprentice Program. Instead of driving an eighteen-wheeler, Sherrill spent most of his weekdays at the shop with Horner, the last year that Horner was still building fiddles.
“I’m telling you, it was just the best of times,” Sherrill said.
In a break between pickup band tunes, luthier Keith Williams remembered how, even during Horner’s last months in the veterans’ home, he stayed focused on fiddles.
From right: Friends Keith Williams, Kenny Sears, Austin Derryberry, and Mike Whitehead (foreground) play at the memorial gathering. (Photo by Lynn Dudenbostel)
“He said, ‘I’d like to get back out at the shop and make one more fiddle,’” Williams said.
But another memory drew a laugh from Williams: joking with Horner about what they’d do if they could get their hands on a real Stradivarius.
Horner’s last apprentice Teddy Sherrill, left, talks fiddle with Horner’s son Bruce, right. (Photo by Lynn Dudenbostel)
“I said, ‘Boy, I’d like to play that thing once,” Williams said.
Horner had a different idea.
“He said, ‘I’d like to take my pocket knife and take the top off and see what’s in the middle of that thing.’” Williams shook his head, grinning.
The memorial gathering was what Horner wanted—had specified, in fact. No service, he’d told his friends. Just get together, play music, and tell stories about “the old dude.” The pickup band traded solos, playing tune after soaring tune. They laughed at stories like Williams’, where Horner wanted to cut open a Stradivarius.
And they all knew this. Horner did get to hold a Stradivarius. Just once. And, no, he didn’t take a pocket knife to it.
The Stradivarius Moment
After Horner turned 70, Sears took him to meet the concertmaster of the Nashville Symphony orchestra. She had a Stradivarius on loan.
“When she pulled it out, Jean’s eyes lit up,” Sears said. “He was like a kid in a candy store and he studied it for the longest time. I could just see he was recording every knife stroke.”
Kenny had brought one of Horner’s fiddles, too. And Horner got to hear his fiddle played next to a Stradivarius.
Horner in his shop. (Photo by Lynn Dudenbostel)
“When she played them back to back, they sounded the same, and when I played them back to back, they sounded the same,” Sears said. “So he was making fiddles every bit as good as Stradivari.”
Horner never forgot. Interviewed after his 90th birthday, in his busy shop—where he had new fiddles in the works—he was still talking about that Stradivarius.
“I think of it every day, how beautiful it was,” he said, his voice in the hushed key of awe. “The craftsmanship was just a perfection that a machine could never get. And yet you could see little flaws—one F hole was set just a little higher. One side of the scroll was carved just a little lower.”
But the flaws didn’t take away from the violin’s beauty.
“Just think of the shiniest thing you can think of—and it would outdo it,” Horner said.
“Living Traditions” is a multimedia project about folklife in central Appalachia. In this series, we bring you an assortment of stories about traditional cultural practices, both time-honored and emergent.
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