Chadwell's Station: Fiddling On Frontier

Christian Wig learned clawhammer banjo in 1971. In the latter 70's, with partner Dave Neff, he owned Boulder Junction Folk Music Center in Uniontown, Ohio, where he built and repaired instruments and ran a coffee house featuring the likes of the Hot Mud Family, the Highwoods, Tracy Schwartz, and other traditional performers, both from the US and UK. Beginning the fiddle in 1975 with South Forty, he has since been featured with the North Fork Rounders, Boiled Buzzards, and Mustill House Muskrats. Fuzzy Mountain, the Skillet Lickers, Tommy Jarrell and Melvin Wine have long influenced him. In his first CD, Gate To Go Through (2004), he explored these roots. In 2006 he and Whitt Mead recorded Lost Indian: Fiddling on the Frontier, drawing from source fiddlers who recorded for the Library of Congress in the 1940s, to get closer to early fiddling styles. More recently have the other sources, from which he drew for this project, shaped his understanding of Old Time fiddling. Whitt Mead began playing Old Time banjo in the early 1970's as a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and by 1976 was transferring those same tunes to the fiddle. During the early 1980's he played in a Cincinnati string band called Company Comin.' From 1986 to the present he has performed with the Rhythm Rats at many venues from square dances to festivals. Since 2003 he has added his talents to the performing duo of Dan Gellert and Debbie Posie, exploring the subtleties of traditional Old Time music. He has taught numerous workshops at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, West Virginia. His early influences include the Highwoods, Tommy Jarrell, Andy Cahan, Kyle Creed, Fred Cockerham and the Skillet Lickers. More recently he has turned to the same sources from which this project draws.