Jim Wood
Jim Wood is a Tennessee fiddler, guitarist and teacher whose five Tennessee State Fiddle Championships are the record, among fifteen state titles and more than 160 contest wins on fiddle, mandolin and guitar. He directs the Tennessee Fiddle Orchestra and, with his wife, the guitarist Inge Wood, runs a music school in Bedford County.
He was born in Nashville on 28 August 1964 and raised outside Fairview, a small town about twenty-five miles southwest of the city. His father, Jimmy Wood, was a respected fiddle accompanist, and between them, he has said, father and son backed nearly every fiddle champion in the region. His own contest wins ran from 1978 to 2001 and include state championships in Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama.
He worked in Nashville’s studios and live music scene until 1999. At his Pinewood Studio he has produced records by Pete Huttlinger and John Hartford, among others. He writes for Fiddler Magazine, and in 2009 Homespun released his two beginners’ fiddle courses, Fiddle for the Absolute Beginner and 20 Easy Tunes for the Beginning Fiddler, the second with Inge on guitar and Jim on second fiddle for play-along practice. As a composer he has taken commissions from the Murfreesboro Symphony Orchestra and the Murfreesboro Youth Orchestra.
Teaching is a large part of his work. Seventeen of his students have won state or national titles, among them the national champions Mike Snider and Maddie Denton. Hillary Klug studied with him for more than a decade after meeting him at the contra dance he and Inge led, and played in that dance band in the Flat Creek community of Bedford County. In 2017 the Tennessee Arts Commission chose him as a master artist in its first Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Program, to teach Ben Ayers guitar accompaniment for old-time and contest fiddling, the art he took up because few contests had good accompanists.
