www.bluegrassdaddy.com
Playing Since: 1987
Experience Level: Expert/Professional

Interests:
[Teaching] [Jamming] [Socializing] [Helping]

Occupation: Teacher

Gender: Male
Age: 52

My Instruments:
Fiddle

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Profile Info:
Visible to: Public
Created 6/19/2015
Last Visit 11/1/2017

My name is John Cockman, and I live in the Appalachian Mountains of Watauga County, NC. I was born in foothills of Sherrill's Ford, NC, and grew up on a fruit tree farm. I discovered my love of fiddling at the age of 13 when I formed a band with my father, older sister, and three younger brothers. We call ourselves The Cockman Family, and perform regularly to this day. bg_daddy6_600Since those days, I have played fiddle professionally and semi-professionally. My favorite styles are bluegrass, old-time, gospel, and Canadian, and I also play some country, blues, and various Celtic styles. I married my wife Jennifer in 1996, and in 2000 and 2001 we were blessed with two beautiful daughters, Arwen and Lorien. In 2000 I began teaching Physics at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. With my new role as a teacher, I began to wonder what I could do to help pass down the kind of bluegrass and old-time fiddling that I had grown up playing. In 2008, I began to offer "free fiddle lessons" to local youth, who meet at my home every Tuesday evening during the summer. I have had as many as 50 students attend these lessons, which culminate in a family fiddle recital in Valle Crucis at the end of the summer. As a family growing up, 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.