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Kerry Varble plays her fiddle with an accompanying guitar player.
Kerry Varble is a three-time grand champion of the Ohio State Old Time Fiddlers Contest in Nelsonville. She’ll be back competing among friends for the 2024 title. [Erin Gottsacker | The Ohio Newsroom]

Fiddlers unite at the Ohio State Old Time Fiddlers Contest in Nelsonville to keep music tradition alive

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NELSONVILLE, Ohio (The Ohio Newsroom) — As the sun set on a horse farm in eastern Ohio’s Columbiana County, Kerry Varble tuned her fiddle in front of a piano decorated with blue ribbons and trophies.

She plays the fiddle competitively at contests all over the country, from Texas to Tennessee. But on this recent evening, she was preparing for a competition closer to home: the Ohio State Old Time Fiddlers Contest.

Varble nodded to her husband, who accompanies her on the guitar, and the two broke into a toe-tapping polka.

“That one I’ve actually never played on this stage before,” she said, lowering her fiddle at the song’s conclusion.

But Friday evening, that could change.

Varble will join dozens of fiddlers in Nelsonville to play rag polkas, waltzes, square dances and swing tunes in hopes of becoming the next Ohio State old time fiddling champion. Varble said she has friends from Alabama and Tennessee traveling to Nelsonville to compete.

The Ohio State Old Time Fiddlers Contest highlights tradition

“A lot of people think we play bluegrass,” Varble said. “But we don’t. Bluegrass is actually fairly new music. It was invented in the 1940s. Our music is a lot older than that.”

Kerry Varble holds a fiddle and a bow sideways.
Kerry Varble holds her fiddle. She has spent hours practicing the instrument and competes in fiddling competitions across the country. [Erin Gottsacker | The Ohio Newsroom]
Old time fiddle music arrived in the Americas with early settlers, she said, who carried the instruments with them from an ocean away. Over time, their tunes evolved into what we now recognize as square dance music.“It has to be perfectly square, so that you could stop it at any time,” Varble said. “If the dance needed to end, you could stop.”Old time fiddlers would play square dances over and over and over again, she said.“They got bored,” Varble said, so they started embellishing melodies and experimenting in different keys and octaves.The experimentation gave way to competition.By the early 1900s, there were fiddling contests all over the country, including Ohio. Newspaper articles from the ‘20s recount contests that drew crowds of hundreds in Cleveland and Toledo.

An article from 1926 in the Springfield Daily News described an event so popular “that the hall was not big enough to accommodate all who attempted to gain admittance.”

The Ohio State Old Time Fiddlers Contest came decades later. It was first held at the state fair in Columbus in 1968, at the request of then governor James Rhodes. Soon after, it moved to Nelsonville, just outside of Athens.

Fiddling in Ohio today

The Ohio State Old Time Fiddlers Contest is one of just two remaining contests in the state, according to Varble. The other is at the Wayne County Fair.

“It’s a dying art,” she said. “It just gets harder and harder to get kids interested in playing fiddle music.”

The contests remain a way for old time fiddlers like her to embrace tradition.

When the show starts at the historic Stuart’s Opera House at 6 p.m., contestants each play a square dance and a waltz. If they advance to the championship round, they’ll have to add a polka or swing tune.

Judges listen for intonation and rhythm, but Varble said old time fiddle music is about more than proper technique. With songs like the “Clarinet Polka” and “Sally Goodin” in her pocket, Varble aims to get the audience dancing.