About your Fiddle Teacher
Dr. John Cockman
john@bluegrassdaddy.com
PO Box 1265, Boone, NC 28607
BRSTA.org
Photo taken during a free BRSTA camp in 2025 on the Jordan V Cook homestead. We offer four free fiddle classes, three dance classes, two guitar classes, and a ukulele class.
My name is John Cockman. I'm a traditional fiddler and an inductee into the Blue Ridge Music Hall of Fame.
First of all, thank you for your subscription. This site supports my musical outreach, BRSTA (Blue Ridge School of Traditional Arts). BRSTA is Charitable 501(c)(3) organization whose goal is a revival of traditional mountain art and music. We are located in Boone, NC, in the heart of the historic Jordan V. Cook homestead. This seventeen-acre steading functions as a school, a camp, and a center of traditional arts.
I have been fiddling since I was 13 years old, when I formed a bluegrass gospel band with my father, older sister, and three younger brothers called The Cockman Family.
Having become a professional fiddler at a young age, I devoted myself to the study of many styles of fiddling. After becoming a master of Bluegrass, Gospel, Old Time, Celtic, Country and Cajun fiddling, I discovered that I get the most joy from teaching others to play the music I love.
Over the past 30 years, I have systematically developed an intuitive teaching style that gets immediate results. My combination of tablature, notation, measure-by-measure instruction, and metronome playback has helped thousands of students reach their goal of jamming and performing on what I believe is the greatest instrument ever created.
More on my history: As a farming family growing up in the foothills of North Carolina, we had no television, video games, or other "modern" form of entertainment, and so we made music. My mother played piano and my father played guitar, and they taught us how to sing and harmonize at an early age. We cut our musical teeth on hymns and old country ballads, until one night my father heard a group called Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, and we fell in love with bluegrass gospel. Soon we were singing and playing at local churches and fiddlers conventions, receiving encouragement and praise from all the area musicians that we looked up to and wanted so badly to emulate. It wasn't until later that I really began to appreciate what the older musicians had done by stepping back in order to allow the younger ones to come to the forefront.
I moved to Boone in 1992, and married my wife Jennifer in 1996. In and in 2000 and 2001 we were blessed with two beautiful daughters, Arwen and Lorien. In 2015 we adopted another daughter, Morgen. Since then we have adopted three more children from Watauga County; Daniel, Rowan, and Elowen.
In 2008, I began to offer "free fiddle classes" to local youth, which grew out of our local JAM (Junior Appalachian Musicians) program. When we outgrew my house, we began meeting at Memorial Park in downtown Blowing Rock. In 2024 I purchased the central hollar of the old Jordan V Cook homestead in Boone. I now have around 75 students who regularly attend these free lessons, which culminate in a jamboree finale at the end of summer. From my summer fiddle camp, a half-dozen youth bluegrass and old-time bands have formed, which have become involved in performing at festivals, churches, rest homes, and fiddlers conventions. Some of my alumni have gone on to become professional musicians and IBMA award winners. It is my vision that people all over, not just here in the mountains, will begin to love and play the music that we grew up with.
Thank you for becoming a member of BluegrassDaddy.com and for supporting my efforts to pass down this great music. It is my prayer that the proceeds from this site will enable me to expand my free local instruction, and help even more of the kids here, and around the world, to learn and to perform the music of their rich and unique mountain heritage.
