A History of Violins in Rock & Roll

 

More than the guitar strings can make us rock. Violinists including John Creach, Richard Sanders, Robby Steinhardt, and David Lindley showed us how.

 

As every new genre of music builds on what came before it, it’s always interesting to see how certain instruments are employed in completely different ways. The incorporation of classical musical instruments in rock & roll music are a good illustration of this creative stretch by artists.

 

Rock of course was initially largely about three instruments: lead guitar, bass guitar, and percussion. But it’s easy to hear instruments such as harpsichords in music by The Beatles, flutes with Jethro Tull (more specifically, flautist Ian Anderson and his one-legged flamingo stance), as well as full stringed orchestras providing a symphonic sound for Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Deep Purple. Paul McCartney might have gotten the credit as lead singer, but it was The Beatles’ producer, George Martin, who laid in orchestral tracks so familiar in “Eleanor Rigby,” “I Am the Walrus,” and “Yesterday.” The cello is featured prominently in Guns and Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle,” and Led Zeppelin’s “All my Love.”

 

But it’s the violin, in acoustic and electric versions, which are definitive parts of the sounds of certain rock artists. Unlike classical violinists who play fine violins that require ongoing maintenance of a violin maker, rockers typically use lesser quality instruments on stage – because of the wear and tear on them through touring and performance – and take their instruments to guitar luthiers. Here is a brief overview of these violin rockers:

 

Jefferson Airplane: Jazz violinist Papa John Creach, whose range of style (blues, classical, jazz, R&B, pop and acid rock) served the group well in such singles as “Bark,” “Long John Silver,” Dragon Fly,” and “Red Octopus.”

 

Kansas: Robby Steinhardt was both the violinist and a founding member of this group, which had its heyday in the 1970s (top hits: “Carry on Wayward Won,” “Point of No Return,” and “Dust in the Wind”). His skills on the strings were in every song in the group’s discography, and he also played the viola on an overlaid track of “Dust in the Wind.”

 

Dave Matthews Band: Violinist Boyd Calvin Tinsley, helped compose some of the star-studded band’s music. His most famous performance was in “Tripping Billies,” a tour-de-force for the electric fiddle. Said Matthews of Tinsley: “We had no plans of adding a violinist. We just wanted some fiddle tracked on this one song, “Tripping Billies,” and Boyd …. came in and it just clicked. That completely solidified the bad, gave it a lot more power.”

 

Fairport Convention: Over a career spanning several decades, Richard Sanders (born in 1952) lent his jazz-rock, folk rock, British folk rock, and folk mastery of the violin to many groups that include Albion Band, Strawbs, Jethro Tull, Robert Plant, Procol Harum, Loudon Wainwright III, Pentangle, All About Eve, and Soft Machine. But his discography with Fairport Convention, over the span of 1985 to 2020, includes “Gladys’ Leap,” “Jewel in the Crown,” “Over the Next Hill,” “Sense of Occasion,” “Festival Bell,” “Myths and Heroes,” and “Shuffle and Go.”

 

Jackson Browne: Browne might have needed multi-instrumentalist David Lindley, but Lindley didn’t need Browne. Lindley began playing the violin at age 3 (and broke the bridge of his first instrument), then took up a variety of other stringed instruments: the baritone ukulele, banjo, and guitar among them. Working with Jackson Browne, his fiddle is heard on “For Everyman,” “Late for the Sky,” “The Pretender,” “Running on Empty,” “Hold Out,” and “Love is Strange: En Vivo Con Tino.”

 

But this conversation is incomplete without crediting the avant-garde composer, musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson, for her inventive takes on the violin. Her “tape-bow violin” uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow where horsehair would be with a magnetic tape head in the bridge. She developed the instrument in 1977 and introduced iterations of it in years that followed. 

The Violins of Isaac Stern

Among the greatest of 20th century virtuosos, Stern left behind great violins and bows. His estate may have bungled it a bit, but the instruments endure.

Just two years after his death, the auctioning of the fine violins, bows, and memorabilia from the estate of Isaac Stern (1920-2001) set the violin universe on fire – with nearly the energy of Tchiakovsky’s Finale: Allegro vivacissimo movement, inspired by Russian folk themes, in the Violin Concerto in D Major op.35 that was part of Stern’s considerable discography.

The story on why the auction happened unfortunately dimmed Stern’s legacy, an otherwise bright life story of international performance that earned him six Grammy Awards, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, and being named to the French Legion of Honor. Carnegie Hall in New York has the Isaac Stern Auditorium, so-named in part to honor his musicianship as well as his civic activism in saving the structure from demolition in the 1960s.

A dispute between the attorney handling Stern’s estate, on behalf of the virtuoso’s third wife of five years, against his adult children from his second marriage, led to a premature and perhaps unnecessary dissolution of the valuable property. The sales netted $3.3 million, which was thought to be necessary to pay off debts as they were originally perceived to be at the time. Upon further inquiry, those debts were due to mishandling of Stern’s Manhattan apartment and other estate matters by the attorney, who was ultimately judged to owe the Stern’s children $563,000.

The Stern progeny were particularly incensed that they learned about the auctioning of the fine stringed instruments and bows only after the auction was publicly announced. Those instruments were bequeathed to them in the violinist’s will.

The items that were sold (by the Tarisio auction house) included 30 bows, including a Tourte (sold for $43,125), a Peccatte ($40,250), and a Sartory ($37,375). Among the instruments sold were Stern’s Vuilllaume violin (1850), a modern copy (by Samuel Zygmuntowicz) of a Guarneri violin, and a Steinway & Sons piano.

But the most beloved of his instruments in his lifetime was Stern’s thirty years with the del Gesu (1740) known as the Ysaÿe Guarnerius, which he played from 1965 through 1995, and which was subsequently owned by the Nippon Music Foundation. Other classical violins he played during his illustrious career were:

• "Kruse-Vormbaum" Stradivarius (1728)
• "ex-Stern" Bergonzi (1733)
• "Panette" Guarneri del Gesù (1737)
• Michele Angelo Bergonzi (1739–1757
• "Arma Senkrah" Guadagnini (1750)
• Giovanni Guadagnini (1754)
• J. B. Vuillaume copy of the "Panette" Guarneri del Gesu of 1737 (c.1850)
• "ex-Nicolas I" J.B. Vuillaume (1840)

Among Stern’s contemporary instruments were a second violin by Samuel Zygmuntowicz and a modern Italian, a Jago Peternella violin.

The fact that all these instruments survive the great violinists who once played them, come what may, is testimony to the enduring nature of great craftsmanship and the reverence they hold among instrumentalists and, increasingly, their patrons.

Sears Roebuck and the Violin

Almost everything was sold via the Sears “Wish Books” of the 20^th century. Worth noting is inexpensive instruments that have long been available – and valued.

 

Fundamentally, shopping online via Amazon in the 2020s is an awful lot like shopping by way of the Sears catalog in the early 1900s. The consumer then and now looked for what they wanted – or browsed for things that caught their eye – and placed an order with payment upfront. That order was then and is now delivered to their doorstep.

 

Items you could buy, then and today, included inexpensive violins for sale. Also known as “student violins” – and back in the day of the Sears Roebuck catalog (Roebuck’s involvement in the business was short lived although the name lasted longer than the person), they sold “tenor violins” which were in fact violas – they sold for as little as $2.95. There were higher-priced models, “High Grade Violins” as the catalog copy read, priced at $29.95.

 

And what’s noteworthy about those violins is they carried the names of history’s greatest luthiers: Stradivarius, Maggini, and Stainer among them – always with the phrasing to the effect of “modeled after the celebrated Stradivarius violin,” lest there be any false representation (which didn’t become illegal until the 1914 Federal Trade Commission Act – and besides, “modeled after” is a fair enough warning, although the labels inside the instruments didn’t provide that detail).

 

But marketing and distribution issues aside, the fact that violins were popular enough to be sold to families in rural Kansas via their Sears catalog is indication of something more. This was a time preceding television and for most, the radio. Playing musical instruments was the most accessible forms of musical entertainment, especially outside cities, on a daily basis. One only went to the theater for special occasions, if there was one within reachable distance.

 

Writer Dina Gold penned in Moment Magazine about the phenomenon in both Europe and the US prior to World War 2 (“The Stars of David that Aren’t,” tracing how vintage violins of the era had inlaid mother-of-pearl six-pointed stars, which some mistakenly think today were violins used in concentration camps during the Holocaust):

 

“Advertised widely as ‘fancy violin’” in U.S. mail-order catalogs such as Rudolph Wurlitzer (started in 1856 in Cincinnati, which had a big German population), Sears Roebuck & Co, C.F. Martin & Co., Montgomery Ward and August Gemunder & Sons, these violins cost on average $8, then likely a week’s pay. Buyers could choose from a large array of patterns and designs as decoration, including statues, flags, flowers, artists’ heads, harps, swirls, eagles, Stars and Stripes, as well as four-, six- and eight-pointed mother-of-pearl inlaid stars.”

 

Today, there is not only a collector’s trade in those cheaper violins, but with the pages right out of vintage Sears catalogs themselves. For bid-prices ranging between $7 and $20, it’s possibly to buy the original pages from those “Wish Books,” as they were called. The breathless marketing copy and the illustrations are as much a glimpse into how things were merchandised at the time as well as what one can imagine life was like a century ago.

 

The parallels between the old Sears catalogs and Amazon and other online retail sellers holds true today. It’s possible to buy a student violin for as little as $69.99 (includes case, shoulder rest, bow, rosin and an extra bridge and strings, in the ¼ size). Given the rate of inflation since 1900 – which is a multiple of 32.66 – the original lowest priced $2.95 violin would cost $96.35 today.  

 

From which one can conclude, at the lowest level of quality anyway, that musical instruments are as economically accessible today as they were 120 years ago.