Fiddling Her Way to the Top

NORTHPORT, Ala. — With a fiddle in her hand since grammar school, Sharon Winters is playing her way to the top.

She's won at least 75 prizes in Southeastern fiddling and bluegrass contests, including seventh place in 1982 at Nashville's prestigious Grand Master Fiddler Contest. Given the extent of her credentials — trophies, certificates, belt buckles, plaques, and cash — it sounds as though she's old as a grandmother. But Sharon is 19 and a college freshman.

It all started in 1975 when the 11-year-old daughter and granddaughter of fiddlers took violin lessons through a school string program. After she learned the basics, Sharon's father encouraged her to play simple fiddle melodies.

Then one evening, father and daughter attended a once-a-week gathering of fiddlers, pickers, and other "old-time" music-makers across the river from Northport at Tuscaloosa's Capitol Park. Sharon stood at center stage scared stiff, but then she lifted her fiddle and came forth with a sonorous "Red River Valley."

It was Sharon's debut but the timid youngster made her father, Randy Winters, stand beside her and play along, note for note. For weeks, the twosome continued to regale the gathering with just that one tune. Then Sharon began to gain confidence, and she broadened her repertoire to include a few more numbers. She also started playing on her own.

Throughout her childhood, Sharon had heard only the traditional mode of fiddle play carried generations back from Ireland to Appalachia and rooted deeply in the Winters family. She was less than enthusiastic.

But in 1976, a few months after she had begun to play seriously, the 12-year-old attended an old-time music and bluegrass festival in Tuscaloosa. The event drew some of the best fiddlers in the South, with flashy, impressive styles she had never thought possible.

Sharon quickly became a fan of "Texas-style fiddling," which involves highly intricate variations and rhythms based only on the major melodic theme. She talked to a Texas-style fiddler, studied tapes of his music, and began a rigorous, all-day-and-into-the-night practice schedule, putting down her fiddle only for meals.

"The Texas style requires loose wrist action which moves in a figure eight," Sharon explains. "There is no action above the elbow. It comes with hours of practice in front of a mirror. I watch my arm in the mirror and make sure it's doing what it's supposed to do."

One of Sharon's back-up guitarists, Claudie Holt of Birmingham, believes her right arm figures highly in her success.

"She has an awfully good bow arm," says Holt. "She has a long arm and she has a natural way of using it. She stresses the downbeat, too. That's the strong beat and not all fiddle players do that." Sharon's parents, her most ardent supporters, go on the road with their fiddler daughter about twice a month during a contest season running from April through November. The family's Southern travels and the talented college freshman's practice have paid off big, with an array of honors ranging from "grand champion" to "fiddle champ" to "fiddle king." But king?

"They didn't plan ahead," Sharon laughs. "They weren't expecting to give the prize to a girl."

One of only two or three young Alabama women to compete in the fiddling arena, Sharon discovered many more female fiddlers at Nashville's Grand Master. "Last year we counted 10 girls in the eliminations and they were as good as most of the men."

Sharon has done pretty well at the Grand Master herself. At 14, she made the semi-finals. At 16, she accomplished the same feat. At 17, she did it again. Last June, the 18-year-old fingered and bowed her way to seventh place.

Although Texas style is Sharon's favorite fiddling mode, she is also at home with the Modern Progressive technique (used widely in Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky), with the Cajun fiddling of Louisiana, with the Bob Wills Texas Swing, with bluegrass, country, and classical violin. She once cut a record of some of her favorite tunes, and is the only fiddle teacher in the Tuscaloosa area. What's more, she also plays the mandolin and has won about 20 first-place prizes as a buckdancer. Little wonder, then, that Felix Blackwell of Tuscaloosa, another of her back-up guitarists, observes, "Anywhere there is a gathering of fiddlers, Sharon is the topic of conversation."