It’s In Her Blood Jaydean Ludiker Devotes Her Time, Energy To Creating Future Fiddle Lovers
JayDean Ludiker doesn’t answer her doorbell, though you can see her plain as day through the window.
Leaning toward a tiny boy in a 2-gallon hat, she’s strumming a guitar to his fiddle bowing, oblivious to the world.
“Whoa Mule,” “Rabbit Where’s Your Mama,” “Billy’s in the Lowground” and “Hell Among the Yearlings.” It’s lesson time at the Ludikers and as students take the fiddle, JayDean Ludiker takes the stage.
Using a simple color and number system she began developing at 16, Ludiker teaches fiddling to 92 students a week in Spokane. Most of the fiddling teachers around started in her classroom. About 20 of her students will compete this weekend in the Northwest Regional Fiddle Contest in the Spokane Valley.
She figures half the music teachers in the area don’t approve of her technique, unwilling as they may be to admit it. Although she can and does teach students to read music, her style isn’t about sheet music and notes.
It’s learning to play by ear and listening to tapes for tone and timing. It’s tricks to get a sound right and feeling the music inside. It’s “Brilliancy,” “Whiskey Before Breakfast” and an Eskimo death march that can choke you with sadness.
“These tunes are American history,” said Ludiker, 31. “Fiddling is the Scots and the Irish and everyone coming over. It’s the slaves who had to play on the plantation, it’s the melting pot.”
And under that pot, keeping the fire going in Spokane, are the Ludikers. JayDean and her husband, Tony Ludiker, 32, attract fiddling students nationwide. Their influence has invigorated a close-knit community and made Spokane a competitive heavyweight.
How heavy? At the National OldTime Fiddlers Contest in Weiser, Idaho each June, camped at one end of the football field is Texas. At the other, Spokane.
“Per capita, I don’t think you’ll find more top fiddle players anywhere than Spokane,” says Jay Schuh, whose fiddling champion son, Gary, was taught by the Ludikers.
Tony Ludiker is a five-time grand national champion whose complex Texas-style playing makes him the fiddling equivalent of Garth Brooks. En route to his sixth title, he’s considering retiring and is not registered to compete Saturday. But his fans will be there.
“At contests, kids ask me what Tony has for breakfast,” JayDean says with an eye roll. Her husband usually doesn’t eat breakfast. But as the mother of two and teacher of many, she always replies that he eats something healthy.
For while Tony Ludiker has carried off a truckload of titles, JayDean has all but quit competing to teach. Her classes, held at private schools and in dizzying succession every half hour in her Spokane Valley home, help draw young girls and adult women to what was once considered an old man’s gig.
“If it weren’t for JayDean, there’d be little fiddling in Spokane,” says Ann Jacobsen, president of the Washington OldTime Fiddlers’ Association, District 2.
“The violin isn’t exactly something you can pick up at 36, but here I am,” says Barbie Knoop, who began lessons after her daughter Kadie did. “Every time I say ‘I can’t do it,’ JayDean says I can. You know, I’m not good, but I am making music.”
Beginning with students as young as 3, Ludiker uses a tablature system outlined in books written and published by the couple. Students listen to cassette tapes, usually in the car and before bed, to learn songs.
Progress is fast. Students can usually play a song after a lesson or two. Four lessons and they’re playing in public: at nursing homes, shopping centers, hospitals. Fiddlers are famed for sharing their music, but JayDean says performing builds a relationship to the violin.
“It helps them internalize it,” she says. “It’s not ‘I’m learning to play fiddle,’ but ‘I am a fiddler.”’
While she believes reading music is important to be well-rounded, fiddling is an oral art, passed ear to ear for generations. At contests, fiddlers are the ones with tape recorders, catching the individual moment. They’re taking 100-year-old songs and improvising.
“To me the word fiddle means take this instrument and do what you want to do,” JayDean says.
Some teachers may argue that technique is lost in the enthusiasm. Bad habits can develop.
But orchestra teachers and parents also note that fiddling can ignite a lifetime love affair with music. Fiddling students tend to advance faster in school orchestras and often pursue classical violin, viola, mandolin and guitar.
They also seem to have more fun.
Sitting at the Ludiker kitchen table last week, Vi Wickam, 18, plows through four grilled cheese sandwiches during a lesson break.
The Greeley, Colo., boy’s parents are paying more than $100 a day for him to train with the Ludikers, including four solid hours of play daily with Tony. “All my progress the rest of the year is matched by what I learn this one week,” says Wickam, who expects to attend college on music scholarships.
Downstairs, Nita Saddler is not even in high school. The Greenacres eighth-grader struggled through years of classical violin, hardly moving off “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” In three years studying with JayDean, she’s become president of the Junior Hoedowners and has a stage presence beyond her years. Like all the Ludiker students, she records a professional tape each fall in lieu of a recital. Unlike most, she sells her tapes for $7.
“She’s really good,” JayDean says. And eventually she’ll move on. While JayDean launches students, the gifted ones often go on to classical instruction or join the small cadre of students Tony accepts annually.
“Tony’s a perfectionist,” says Jay Schuh. “And he perfects them.”
The Ludikers met at a fiddling contest in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. When their engagement was announced at a party of fiddlers, the news was met with shocked silence. The two were known competitors who disliked each other openly. After 12 years of marriage, the competition is still obvious. They can’t play pinochle on the same team, and their verbal sparring can stretch around a corner like a missed note. But having a partner who loves fiddling makes their lives complete, said Tony.
“We’re a very unified family. We do everything together.”
The 11th of 13 children, JayDean began fiddling in grade school, inspired by her late father, Lloyd Warner.
Practicing before dinner, she’d emerge to find it was 10 p.m. and the family was preparing for bed.
“I’d think they’d turned out the lights, switched the clocks and put the food away. I’d lost that much track of time.”
If a tune started in her head at school, she’d have to fake illness to go home and play it. To this day, she can’t hum a tune at a restaurant or it will stick in the family’s heads until they flee.
The couple’s son, Dennis, 11, and daughter Kimber, 10, are “bilingual. They speak English and fiddle,” JayDean says. Both compete.
JayDean captured national women and junior titles in the 1980s. But even if Tony retires this year, the family’s fiddling isn’t likely to slow down. It’s a hobby that can easily become a lifestyle.
Traveling to contests from spring through October, fiddlers are famous for late-night jams and late morning rises. Friendships span years and state lines. When a fiddler begins to date, everyone prays it’s another fiddler.
“Who else would understand I need to drive 500 miles this weekend to lose $40 and sleep in the back of my car?” JayDean says.
Fiddling is growing. The number of JayDean’s students has doubled in the past two years. Some say it’s the increased popularity of country music. Tony Ludiker believes it’s the intoxicating Texas style, brought to this state 20 years ago by Benny Thomasson and honed by fiddling great Mark O’Connor.
That style rings out in the Ludiker home, in classrooms that JayDean built, from drywall to finish. Upstairs, fiddles hang in a living room with no television and “fiddle era” furnishings (circa 1900).
JayDean teaches group classes at St. Mary’s Catholic School, Orchard Prairie and the Spokane Junior Academy (the couple are Seventh-day Adventists).
She also volunteers Tuesday nights at free public workshops at North Pines Junior High. For 21 years, Frank Wagner and dozens of adults and children have met weekly to jam on guitars, banjos and fiddles.
In the midst of the music is JayDean, not playing herself, but applauding, arranging, choreographing. Her fingertips are flat and calloused, and after 12 hours of lessons that day, she is still, somehow, keeping time.
“It’s an incredible workload and I don’t know anyone else who could do it,” says one father, Dave Bula. “She does it for the kids and to keep fiddling alive.”
xxxx FIDDLIN’ AROUND The 27th Northwest Regional Fiddle Contest will be held Saturday and Sunday at Trant Elementary School in the Spokane Valley. The early show begins 8 a.m. Saturday with a main show at 6:30 p.m. and continues Sunday at 9 a.m. Tickets are $5 for adults, $4 for students/seniors, children under 5 are free. For more information call 226-0328 or Lundin’s Violins at 926-7357.