EdNC. Essential education news. Important stories. Your voice.

Search ednc.org

Building violins in Surry County, hub of old-time fiddle history

Surry Community College Instructor Joe Thrift, right, with students in his violin making class. Michelle Lotker/EducationNC

Share this story

Our republishing policy

EdNC is a nonprofit, online, daily, independent newspaper. All of EdNC’s content is open source and free to republish. Please use the following guidelines when republishing our content.
  • Our content must be republished in full. If your organization uses a paywall, the content must be provided in full for free.
  • Credit our team by including both the author name and EdNC.org in the byline. Example: Alex Granados, EdNC.org.
  • If republishing the story online, please provide a link to EdNC.org or a link to the original article in either the byline or credit line.
  • The original headline of the article must be used. Allowable edits to the content of the piece include changes to meet your publication’s style guide and references to dates (i.e. this week changed to last week). Other edits must be approved by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
  • Photos and other multimedia elements (audio, video, etc.) may not be republished without prior permission. Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you are interested in sharing a multimedia element.
  • If you republish a story, please let us know by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you have any questions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Canonical tag

Please include the following canonical tag in the <head> of the republished story.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.ednc.org/building-violins-in-surry-county-hub-of-old-time-fiddle-history/">

HTML content

This includes the title, byline, content, and tracking pixel required for republishing this story.

Copy & paste HTML
This story is tagged:

Most students don’t take the same class over and over again for several semesters, at least not on purpose. But students in Joe Thrift’s violin making course at Surry Community College do just that, some of them staying in the course for years to complete their instruments.

Joe Thrift has been teaching a violin making course at Surry Community College for the last six years. He trained in England, at the Newark School of Violin Making, as part of a class that turned out to be what Thrift describes as “the class of all time” because it produced so many great violin makers, including Roger Hargrave.

When Thrift started making instruments back in the United States, a person in need of mentorship made him realize he enjoyed passing on the knowledge he’d gained. That’s when he pitched the idea of starting a violin making course to Surry Community College.

The class has grown from an initial 12 students to 50 students, and Thrift has to keep adding class sections to keep up with demand. A few years back he hired one of his top students, Russell McCumber, to be his assistant, and now they teach five sections of the class together.

When asked what he loves about teaching the course, Thrift says, “I just like seeing people who are really excited about what they’re doing, and the highlight of their week is coming here. And it’s a big social thing along with a learning process, and we play a little bit of music, but the social aspect of it is huge for everybody I think, and I love all of that as well.”

It seems like what everyone in the class loves the most, though, is hearing the instruments they’ve built finally make music.