Fiddle | Betty Vornbrock | Beginning/Intermediate | Period 2 | Week 3 (July 20-24, 2026)
From just-starting-out to picking-up-tunes, we will concentrate on the basics of playing, exercises and tips, and attention to finding the rhythm that makes the tunes dance! Our tunes will reflect the mountain spirit of West Virginia, Kentucky, and the Blue Ridge. With some personal attention, as time permits, your beginning skills will improve, and intermediates will learn fun ways to express the beat and feeling of a tune, and keep those toes tapping! Let me help you tweak your technique to make fiddling easier, and learn some fun tunes that will last a lifetime! Check out more about Betty’s class below!
A note from Augusta: This class will not teach from-scratch basics. Students should be familiar and comfortable with their instrument and able to pick up basic techniques and tunes by ear. Check out Augusta’s evening mini-class offerings for from-scratch options!
About the Instructor
Betty Vornbrock is an accomplished fiddler in several different traditional styles. Her first love is that of the Appalachian Mountains, and has focused on the tunes of West Virginia, Kentucky, and the Blue Ridge since the late ’70’s. Her classes concentrate on the diversity of these regions and players to help students develop their own sound. For the most part her Old-Time influences include West Virginia fiddlers Wilson Douglas, Melvin Wine, Sarah Singleton, and Burl and Edn Hammons; Kentucky fiddlers J.P. Fraley, Ed Haley, Clyde Davenport, and Snake Chapman; and, close to her home in Virginia’s Blue Ridge, Taylor Kimble, Ralph Blizard, G.B. Grayson, Tommy Jarrell, Emmett Lundy, and Henry Reed. From one-day workshops to week-long fiddle classes, Betty has enjoyed teaching at private homes, Augusta Heritage Workshops, Cowan Creek Mountain Music Week, Blue Ridge Old Time Music Week (Mars Hill), and Chestnut Creek
School of the Arts. She also teaches private lessons, and has been on the Board and faculty of a valued after-school program in Galax, VA – Junior Appalachian Musicians (JAM).
In 2018 Betty was a featured Master Fiddler at the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, Port Townsend, WA. Betty and her band, the Reed Island Rounders, hit the festival circuit each summer, and have taken honors at Galax, Mount Airy, Clifftop, Glenville, Fiddler’s Grove, and many of the other fiddlers’ conventions. They have toured the UK & Ireland, and as guests of the FOAOTMAD Festival in England multiple years. The band loves to play for squaredances and contras, festivals, and house concerts. The Rounders have produced 4 CDs as a band; Betty joined J.P. Fraley on their twin fiddle CD “Side by Side”, and she has a few collaborations with others over the years.