TOMMY MALBOEUF

North Carolina's Red-Haired Fiddler

Thomas “Tommy” Owen Malboeuf (1933 - 2014) was adopted as an infant by Carl and Jean Malbouef. He attended high school in Troutman, North Carolina and enlisted in the Navy in the early 1950s, right out of high school. He married in 1952. Shortly after the wedding, Tommy and his new wife, Bonnie, relocated to California, where he was stationed. Tommy and Bonnie had four children, three boys and one girl. The couple separated in 1975.

After his time in uniform, Tommy found intermittent employment surveying and operating heavy equipment, but for the most part he made his way by getting paid for fiddling, working with various bands, and fiddling on commercial recordings.

How Tommy Learned to Fiddle

In May 2000, Tommy told Mike Barnhardt (“Champion Fiddler Full of Colorful Stories,” Davie County Enterprise Record) that when he was 14 years old, he stole a pig from his father, who raised the animals in rural Iredall County, hopped on his motorcycle, found himself on a dirt road, drove up that road and traded the pig for a rifle, then drove another couple of miles before he traded the rifle for a fiddle, bow and case.

Tommy said he took that fiddle home, hauled it into the bathroom, started sawing the bow across the strings, and was quickly instructed by the family to head for the barn. That ended up being far from the most acceptable alternatives: “The cows quit milking, so I had to go to the chicken house.” The chickens stopped producing eggs, so Tommy made his way to a culvert next to the road and continued to saw away at that fiddle. “It sounded good to a young farm boy,” Barnhardt noted, and a couple of years later Tommy managed to learn how to tune the fiddle.

Tommy’s Fiddling in the 60s and 70s

Tommy played with the Border Mountain Boys and recorded the LP “Bluegrass on the Mountain” with them in 1969 (Homestead Records, 101). Cullen Galyean (guitar/lead vocals), L.W. Lambert (banjo), Jim Holder (mandolin: baritone vocals), and Guy “Buck” Arrington (electric bass and tenor vocals) and Tommy made up the band.

WFMX in Statesville, North Carolina, broadcast primarily country music. Odell Wood worked at the Statesville radio station. He was the brother of banjo picker A.L. Wood whose band, the Smokey Ridge Boys, occasionally opened for Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. In the early 1970s, Tommy was the fiddle player with A.L. Wood.

In 1972, Tommy played with the Blue River Boys, reorganized by L.W. Lambert (banjo), which included Herb Lambert (mandolin), Ray Cline (lead guitar), Joe Greene (bass), and Elbert Arrington (guitar.) Tommy's take on “Orange Blossom Special” was immortalized in the album commemorating the Union Grove Old Time Fiddlers 49th Convention (Union Grove Talking Machine Records (73 - 751006).

Jim Scancarelli, a fiddler and banjo player from Charlotte, North Carolina, is an American cartoonist who, since 1986, has been the writer and artist at the helm of the syndicated comic strip Gasoline Alley for Tribune Media Services. He met Tommy in the mid1960s at Union Grove and played fiddle with him in the bluegrass band, Sanitary Cafe. Tommy, Jim said, played with the fury of Scotty Stoneman. He had power, and he was creative, especially in the fiddle backup work he did. He could play a 3/4 tune on his fiddle and make it sound as though an orchestra was playing it. He tended to play countermelodies up high on the fingerboard; he could stretch that pinky, Jim remembered. Kenny Baker once told Jim that if Tommy had not been “involved” with alcohol, Tommy would have been Kenny Baker.

Tommy’s Recorded Music

In the 1970s, Jim Scancarelli did the artwork, engineer and design work for seven LPs recorded on a label named “Old Oblivion.” Two Old Oblivion releases featured Tommy's fiddling. The LP was recorded at the Philadelphia Deli in Charlotte, North Carolina, and prepared as cassette tapes from those original recordings in December 1991 by Mike Robinson at Audioworks, in

Charlotte, North Carolina.

The seventh recording, “Twin Fiddles,” (OO-7) featured the music of Jim Scancarelli (lead fiddle), Tommy (harmony fiddle), and Jim Greene (guitar). The three met at Greene's home in Charlotte for a jam session in June 1996.

Interestingly, at some point, Tommy utilized the Old Oblivion label, and issued a homemade recording as 006. The product was called “Tommy Malboeuf: Orange Blossom Special.” That recording featured the fiddling of Tommy who was joined by Hannah Vogel (guest fiddle), J.P. Van Hoy (bass, guitar, keyboard), Clay Lunsford (guitar, banjo), Mary Umbarger (autoharp), Gay Tatman (flute, penny whistle) and Stephanie Spranta (vocals). Jim did not know any of this until November 2020, when received a CD copy of the recording, and a scanned copy of the cover and brief liner notes.

Seeing and then hearing Tommy's music as “OO-6” for the first time, several decades after it had been released, drove Jim back to the high energy twin fiddling he and Tommy did together, to the way they figured out how to push their twin fiddling forward in an exploratory way. They played together with flexibility and mutual respect, trading the lead and the harmony parts, learning things about their own fiddling as they worked to give enough room to each other to nudge their music forward.

The Sanitary Cafe Band

For a time in the 1970s and 1980s, Jim drove to Tommy's home once a week, making what he described as a “pilgrimage,” to hang around, talk, play music, and eat country food.

In the late 1980s, Jim started a band called Sanitary Café, built around himself and Tommy. Jim recalled that it was Tommy who came up with the name for the band. The band stayed together from 1989 to 1991 and cut an album sometime around 1991.

Tommy remained active as a fiddler through the 1990s. He placed 6th in the bluegrass fiddle category in the competition judged at the Old Fiddlers' Convention in Galax, Virginia, in 1990. In 1998, Tommy twin fiddled on several cuts with Jeff Michaels, the fiddler for Big Country Bluegrass, on their album “Up In The High Country” (Hay Holler Records, HH-CD 1340).

Tommy’s Teaching Technique

Tommy's approach to demonstrating each tune revolved around, first, playing the tune up to speed; second, playing slowed down, with the film focusing on left-hand fingering work; and, third, a version that showed his bowing patterns. For him, that was a sufficient way to launch a student, judging from a comment he offered while showing how he plays “Kentucky Waltz”: “If you can't get it this time, you ain't gonna get it anyhow.”

His one brief piece of advice: “Don't never want to get the bow too loose or tight. Too tight, it's like a horse running across a bridge.” He held his bow with three fingers on top of the bow, in the neighborhood of the frog, between the middle of the winding and the pad. He did not venture toward the wood. His pinky finger never seemed anchored on the screw; it was, basically, free floating, sometimes under but never really hugging the business end of the bow at the southernmost tip. His thumb rested between the wood and the hair. He noted his shoulder rest enabled him to move his fingerboard hand, his left hand, up and down the length of the fingerboard without having to clamp the southern end of the fiddle tightly under his chin. He recommended putting rosin on stubborn tuning pegs that don't yield to normal efforts to get them to turn. Tommy had fine tuners on all four strings of the fiddle he used in this video.

Tommy slurred slides to get a minor sounding note from time to time, such as when he fancied up the “Shave and a Haircut” ending to “Old Joe Clark”. He also seemed to move his left hand into positions on the fingerboard, plant his pointer, and move the other three fingers around as though the pointer was serving as a capo. He was fond of the sound he achieved playing out of two finger chords. He got most of his notes from the top third of the bow.

Conclusion

Jim Scancarelli was quick to note that although they spent time working on things like bowing technique and working out twin fiddle routines, in the end, Tommy was the one with “soul and creativity” who mastered playing fiddle lead and harmony.

Tommy knew waltzes, and he knew church music, which to him was an entirely different sort of harmony. He knew where to find the notes, how to drive a melody forward, but he was always looking to find how to get harmony into a tune. He thought about that a lot, Jim said, and seemed to hear harmony in his mind.

Tommy actually used the phrase, “Don't play the pretty out of the tune” in attempting to persuade his fiddle students to avoid digging into a number a bit too hard in a way that took the “smooth” out of a tune and ran it into the ground before the fiddle could get any emotion out of the melody. He encouraged students to “look, listen, replicate, feel, and then practice.” Teaching and learning, to Tommy, at least in those years, was a process of “conversation” that took place in measured, thoughtful, careful ways.

Lew Stern is the author of Tommy Malboeuf: The Life of a Carolinian Fiddler. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2022. Thanks to McFarland Books (McFarlandBooks. com) for permission for a one-time nonexclusive use of material from Tommy Malboeuf: The Life of a Carolina Fiddler © 2022.