Jim Chancellor

He was born in Dallas in 1943, one of five children in a family where the boys all played. When he was seven his father, who was something of a trader, brought home a mandolin and a guitar and let the brothers choose: Jim took the mandolin and his older brother Allen the guitar, and the first melody he picked out was “Buffalo Gals,” hummed to him by his mother. By the age of nine he was playing over KTER in Terrell, Texas, on fifteen minutes of airtime the family bought for The Texas Al and Shorty Show; he was the short, round younger brother, hence the name. When Allen left to make his own way, the program became Texas Shorty alone, with his father backing him on guitar, and the two traveled to fiddle contests.

At thirteen he met Benny Thomasson, a Dallas–Fort Worth body-shop man who had just won the world championship, and put the mandolin down for the fiddle. He learned under Thomasson’s direct teaching, from the many older fiddlers he met at contests, and from old 78 rpm records, and he played by ear, never learning to read music. Thomasson’s way of embellishing the old fiddle tunes with long bow strokes and endless variations became the model for the modern Texas contest style, and Chancellor, as his student, helped establish it. At about fourteen, barely a year after meeting Thomasson, he won his first contest, at Strawn, west of Fort Worth, with Thomasson in the field. At sixteen, after newspapers reported his win at the world championship, he was flown to New York to appear on the television game show To Tell the Truth.

He is credited as the youngest fiddler to win the World Championship at Crockett, and he became the second fiddler, after Thomasson, to win it three times in a row, which under the contest’s rules then retired him from competing there. When the rule was later dropped he went back and won three more in a row. He also won the Texas State Championship five times and is a member of the Texas Fiddler Hall of Fame.

He was among the first Texas fiddlers to sell his own records, a series of 45 rpm singles from the 1960s that he later collected on CD. On 14 June 1976, at the Starday studio in Nashville, he recorded with Thomasson, Terry Morris and the young Mark O’Connor for Texas Jam Session Featuring Four World Champion Fiddlers (OMAC, 1977), playing twin and quadruple fiddle on pieces such as “Billy in the Low Ground” and “Sally Johnson” and taking solo features on “Here, There and Everywhere.” His album Texas Shorty, World Champion Fiddler, from the 1980s, featured O’Connor, Gerald Jones, Robert Bowlin and Sam Bush along with Elden Graham and his brother Robert Chancellor. The folklorist Alan Govenar produced a cassette of his Texas-style fiddling, with Robert Chancellor on guitar and Jerry Thomasson on tenor guitar, and with John Hartford he made Old Sport, an album of old-time fiddle tunes on Hartford’s Small Dog A-Barkin’ label.

Away from the contests he served in the Army and then spent more than twenty years at Southwest Airlines, where he started as customer relations director. After retiring in 2000 he competed actively again for a few years. The 2010 National Heritage Fellowship, which he received in the same class as Del McCoury, was presented at the Library of Congress and at a concert in Bethesda, Maryland, on 24 September 2010. At the time of the award he was teaching Texas fiddling in classes and workshops and performing with his wife, Ruthie.