An Afternoon with Arvil

On Fridays throughout the summer months, Arvil Freeman plays the fiddle with the Stoney Creek Boys at the Montreat barn dance. Saturday nights feature him on stage in downtown Asheville, part of the house band at Shindig on the Green. 

But most of the time, no matter the season, Arvil and his fiddle hold court in his living room—also known as his teaching studio. That’s where my fiddle and I have joined him for the afternoon.

I’ve taken lessons from Arvil in the past, but it’s been a few years since I’ve been to his home on Stony Knob Road. Even so, he greets me with a big bear hug when I pull up. After we step inside, he tells me another fiddler has just left, and that he teaches all day Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. He’s a prolific musician in his own right, but he prioritizes his students and won’t take a gig on a day he’s scheduled to teach. For his mid-80s, this all seems like quite a rigorous schedule, but he takes care of himself, and his full teaching schedule keeps him dexterous on his instrument.

I’m officially here for an interview, but when I ask if I can set up a microphone, Arvil says, “You can find out everything you need to know about me on YouTube. Let’s play fiddles.” Laying aside my original intentions, I eagerly get out my instrument. I changed the strings earlier that morning, so it’s painfully out of tune, but Arvil waits patiently while I wrestle with the tuning pegs.

Born in 1932 in the Paw Paw community of Madison County, North Carolina, Arvil taught himself to play the fiddle by listening to his older brother, Gordon, and other musicians in the area. A talented musician, as a teenager he began performing with many seminal groups of early bluegrass including Zeke & Wiley Morris, the Sauceman Brothers, and Reno & Smiley. Though he enjoyed the excitement of touring with different bands over the years, it was hard work and he grew weary of the road. He eventually chose to work a full-time job as a meat technician at Ingles and play music on the side. Now retired, he focuses on his teaching and, on the weekends, performing around the area. 

Arvil’s fiddle playing is hard to put in a box. Unlike a lot of musicians in the area who identify with a certain genre, when I ask whether he plays bluegrass or old-time music, he simply says, “I play fiddle music.” While most of his early counterparts in Madison County were old-time fiddlers, Arvil came of age during the development of “long-bow” fiddling, popularized by Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith in the 1930s. This new style linked melody notes together into one bow stroke, resulting in a smoother style of playing. Arvil’s unique style incorporates elements of old-time fiddling, square dance tunes, as well as the double-stops and long bows of bluegrass fiddling.

Lessons always start out by playing Arvil’s fiddles, and he usually seems to have a newcomer in rotation, which today turned out to be a newer Chinese-made fiddle. “It’s one of the best, easiest playing fiddles I’ve ever played.” It’s especially great to play for square dances, he explains, when you have to play a song for five to six minutes. After I try his Hopf violin and a Stradivarius copy on loan from a fellow musician named Bryan McDowell, we begin to play.

We start off with “Bitter Creek,” a fiddle tune I picked up at the Mount Airy Fiddler’s Convention, and also used to play with my husband’s grandfather, the pioneering bluegrass fiddler Jim Shumate. Arvil’s version is a bit different, but we’re able to play the tune together. Ever a master of improvisation, Arvil shows me a way to play the first section in the lower octave to change up the melody. Next we work on variations for “Hop High Ladies,” known as “Miss McCloud’s Reel” in Irish circles. He shows me how to drone on the low strings along with the melody to “make it old-timey.” Arvil explains that he worked up all these variations from playing at square dances. “I experimented, since nobody was listening anyway, because they’re out there concentrating on the beat. So that’s where I came up with a lot of these different arrangements.”

While Arvil has toured and performed across the country, teaching has become his calling and he’s passionate about sharing music with others. “Back when I was trying to learn, I didn’t have anybody to learn from. Most of the old-time fiddle players definitely weren’t going to show you, sit down like we’re sitting down. That’s what I’m here for now … my main goal the remainder of my life is teaching. I’ve got 22 students and I’ve got some youngsters coming up—10, 11 years old—that will knock your eyes out. I love it. There’s nothing I like better than teaching.” 

We wrap up our time together playing double fiddles on a haunting Bill Monroe tune called “Jerusalem Ridge.” When I thank him for his time and the lesson, Arvil says, “I enjoyed every minute of it,” and I know it’s true.