Kimber Ludiker
Introducing Kids to Bluegrass Music
One of the best ways to ensure that bluegrass music continues to grow and blossom in the future is to introduce the music to young children. Time has proven that when kids are exposed to bluegrass at an early age, it is likely to stay with them the rest of their lives. Today, there is no one in the bluegrass world doing more to make sure that kids have the opportunity to gain exposure to, and learn how to play, bluegrass music than Kimber Ludiker.
Kimber, a fifth-generation fiddler originally from Spokane, Washington, is the founding member of the highly successful all-female bluegrass band Della Mae. In addition to maintaining her busy schedule with the band, Kimber has partnered with both the California Bluegrass Association (CBA) and the TrueFire music learning site (truefire.com) in a variety of ways to make sure that young people learn about bluegrass music and learn how to play bluegrass music.
To expose very young kids to bluegrass, Kimber has worked with the CBA to develop an iPad app called Bluegrass Campout that teaches kids about the music through animated cartoon characters. For older kids, who are ready to learn how to play bluegrass instruments, Kimber has developed an online instructional section of the TrueFire learning platform. She is also the director of the Youth Academy at the CBA’s annual Fathers’ Day Bluegrass Festival. Before explaining more about these programs, let’s take a look at Kimber’s background and how she became involved in them.
The Daughter of Fiddlers
Kimber Ludiker was born into a family of fiddlers. Both of her parents grew up playing fiddle at competitions and, on her mother’s side, fiddling reaches back for five generations. In fact, her parents met at a fiddle competition when they were both young pre-teenagers. Kimber explained, “My dad was young and winning all of these fiddle contests and my mom entered her first fiddle contest and beat him. About that time, my grandpa retired and started driving all of the kids—my mom and my dad and my dad’s brother—all over the country to different fiddle contests.” Kimber can trace her family’s fiddle lineage back to Norway—she represents the fifth generation of family fiddlers. She believes that it was the second generation that immigrated from Norway to the United States, settling in the Dakotas.
Kimber’s grandfather and great-grandfather were loggers and moved to the Spokane area when her grandfather (Lloyd) was a teenager. In addition to working in the logging industry, her grandfather played fiddle for local barn dances and did a lot of jamming.
In addition to playing in contests, Kimber’s mother, JayDean, has been a fiddle instructor since Kimber was born. Kimber said, “My mom had over one hundred fiddle students that came through my childhood home weekly. There is kind of a fiddle empire up there in the Spokane area, which is pretty amazing.” Regarding her introduction to playing the fiddle herself, Kimber said, “I was probably about three years old when I could play my first tunes, but I was fiddling around with it before that. My mom and dad always say that my brother and I started when we were three, but he is a year older. I wouldn’t say that I could play anything at two though. My grandpa found a little fiddle for my brother and I because we were drawn towards my parent’s fiddles, and you don’t want a toddler grabbing a violin.”
When asked about how she learned to play, Kimber said, “We were around the lessons so much that we didn’t have proper lessons from our parents. I learned a lot of the tunes that I knew early on from my grandpa. We would hang out at my grandparent’s house and sit and play fiddles with my grandpa.”
Kimber won the “Youngest Fiddler” award at the prestigious fiddle competition in Weiser, Idaho when she was five. She went on to win the national junior championship when she was fifteen and then won the grand nationals in 2009 and 2010. In 2010 she retired from fiddle contests.
Kimber’s father, Tony, was the 13-time Washington state fiddle champion and won the grand nationals five times (1983, 1989, 1991,1993, 1994). Kimber said, “My dad and Mark O’Connor used to duke it out at the fiddle contests.” O’Connor won the grand nationals in 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1984. Tony Ludiker also played and taught fiddle in the Spokane area for decades and, later, was a regular at the Flying W Ranch in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Additionally, he performed with rock star Rod Stewart and country singer Ray Price. Sadly, Tony passed in 2014 following a lengthy battle with kidney cancer.
Kimber’s mother was the national junior champion at age 17 and the national ladies champion at 18. She has consistently placed in the top five of the grand nationals. JayDean still teaches old-time fiddling and writes instructional manuals through her company Ludiker Music (ludikermusic.com). She also organizes children’s performance groups, judges fiddle contests, and teaches at fiddle camps.
Della Mae
Kimber came up with the idea of forming an all-female bluegrass band in 2009. She said, “I looked at the top bluegrass bands and I didn’t see a lot of women up there playing the fiddle. You just didn’t see as many side-women as you’d want to. I’d spent my whole life training on the fiddle and it was pretty depressing. So, I thought, ‘Well, we will just make our own place.’ I knew side-women in the industry, so I started making some calls. It kind of came together after being at a music camp in California and talking with Abigail Washburn about her success with Uncle Earl and dreaming about a bluegrass version of Uncle Earl. There have been all-women bands paving the paths before Della Mae, but not a whole lot of them.”
Since their configuration, the band has traveled to over 20 countries as music diplomats with the US Department of State, had the opportunity to tour with Steve Martin & Martin Short on several occasions, and received a Grammy nomination for their record This World Oft Can Be. The band has operated under a mission statement to showcase top female musicians, and to improve opportunities for women and girls through advocacy, mentorship, programming, and performance. The current touring band consists of songwriter and vocal powerhouse Celia Woodsmith, founding member and guitarist Avril Smith, IBMA Bass Player of the Year nominee Vickie Vaughn, and Ludiker. Kimber says “The band takes pride in being a band with a mission statement, and we feel as though we’ve done a really good job showcasing women in acoustic music.”
The CBA Youth Academy
The work that Kimber is currently involved with in conjunction with the California Bluegrass Association was born when she attended IBMA’s Leadership Bluegrass and got to know Darby Brandli better. Kimber said, “I did Leadership Bluegrass in 2016 and Darby Brandli, who is basically the matriarch of California Bluegrass, was in my class. We became best friends during that week. On the last day we promised each other that we would change the world. If you know Darby, she meant it. Time passed, and we would check in on each other and try to figure out what our move was. There was an opening for the director of the CBA Youth Academy and I took over the program in 2019. It started there.”
The CBA sponsors several kid’s programs in conjunction with their annual Father’s Day Weekend festival. They have the Youth Academy, which is designed for beginner-to-intermediate level kids. Once they reach a level to where they are ready to play in a band, they move on to the Kids On Bluegrass program which was started a few decades ago by Frank Solivan, Sr. Both the Youth Academy participants and the Kids on Bluegrass work with their respective program during the first few days of the festival and then they have the opportunity to perform on stage.
Kimber explained, “Each kid has a solid tract and they all have an instrument class and a band class everyday. They enter at their skill level and we want to get them through the program so they can learn to be in a band.” There are about six instructors for the kids program (which, recently, has included members of Della Mae), plus teacher’s assistants, so the class sizes can remain small. Many of the teacher’s assistants are young adults who have already been through the program. Kimber said, “Part of our mission is to train our next group of leaders. We are teaching kids how to play bluegrass, but we are also mentoring young adults to take over all of the programs one day. We get them involved in the administration and the instruction. That is a way to ensure that these festivals and these programs are going to last a lifetime.”
One of the truly wonderful components of this program is the instrument lending library. Kimber said, “We have some kids that have never touched an instrument. Part of our curriculum is an instrument petting zoo where kids can explore instruments while they are there. We believe that if you try to play every instrument, you will find one that resonates with you. A lot of kids don’t have access to instruments so part of what we do at CBA is have an instrument lending library. We have a collection of instruments on site and any kid can check out an instrument for free and take it home for a year.”
Regarding the program cost for kids who attend, Kimber explained that there is a fee for involvement in the program, however, they give away a lot of scholarships. The bottom line is that if a kid wants to be involved in the program, they will be included. Kimber said, “Any kid who needs a scholarship gets one. If there is a family who wants their kid to learn and can’t afford it, we take them…no questions asked. Over half of our kids receive some kind of a scholarship. The scholarships are provided through sponsorships and fundraising.”
During the pandemic, CBA organized a live streaming Jam-A-Thon to raise money to support their Youth Academy and their educational bluegrass website hosted by TrueFire. The event was held in January of 2021 and during its 50+ hours of continuous live music, workshops, and jams, over 200 artists from twelve countries came together to play music. The Jam-A-Thon was viewed by over 70,000 people worldwide. The event raised over $25,000. Kimber, who initiated the idea and was the motivating force behind it, said, “I was awake for all but four hours of the event, running the stream.” The CBA Jam-A-Thon was nominated for “Event of the Year” at IBMA in 2021.
TrueFire Online Lesson Channel
During the pandemic, Kimber and the good folks at CBA had the idea of offering kids something to do during the down days at home. Kimber said, “The idea was to do an online music school where youth of all ages could access music lessons from amazing instructors.” At this time, lessons are provided on guitar, bass, fiddle, mandolin, 5-string banjo, clawhammer banjo, and ukulele—with Dobro to come in the near future. So far, instructors include Pheobe Hunt (fiddle), Tristan Scroggins (mandolin), Courtney Hartman (guitar), Tray Wellington (banj0), Sav Sankaran (bass), Marcy Marxer (ukulele), and Cathy Fink (clawhammer banjo).
Regarding this program, Kimber said, “TrueFire is one of the largest online music learning programs, but they don’t offer a lot of videos on bluegrass, so we thought it would be a good fit. Our plan is to continually release new courses. The beginner courses are out now and as winter rolls out, we will keep building on that. You can create a free account on TrueFire and you can watch a lot of the videos for free. Then there is subscription-based stuff. You are also able to get a free one-week trail by going to bluegrassyouth.com.”
In addition to the current video lessons, the site includes CBA’s Youth Academy songbook. Kimber said, “The songbook includes lyrics and chord charts and has recognizable bluegrass musicians performing on jam-along videos so that you can play along with your favorite artists. During the jam-along they leave a spot for you to take a solo, so it is pretty fun.” A lick library will also soon be added to the site. Check it out at californiabluegrass.org/bluegrass-academy.
Bluegrass Campout—The Bluegrass Music App for Young Kids
A bluegrass iPad app for young children is one of the newest CBA innovations. CBA President Pete Ludé described it like this, “This app will allow the real young ones to get use to the instruments and see how they work. It will have some sing-a-long songs to keep them busy while their older siblings are off woodshedding. This app is based on one that was sort of out in the field already, but it had gone obsolete and so we purchased the rights to that and created a whole set of characters— cute bluegrass animals that are playing the instruments.”
Kimber explains, “Right now, this is an iOS iPad app that is a bluegrass exploration app for early childhood education—from the first screen holders to the age of eight, or so. It features a band of woodland creatures and you can follow them from jamming at the camp site to playing on the main stage at a bluegrass festival. It is a very cute, simple app. We used an illustrator who, at the time, was a senior in high school. Every program that we do with CBA for the youth, we frame as a mentorship opportunity and get young people involved. Our artist worked directly with the programmer and she learned so much. She is a freshman in college now and all the work that she did with CBA ended up in her portfolio.”
When asked about the motivation behind putting out this app, Kimber said, “Part of what we are trying to do is recruit people into falling in love with bluegrass, falling in love with instruments…wanting to learn the music. Having something that is available for very young children—choosing between different educational games—why not have a bluegrass one? It is a bluegrass version of something for kids to do.” To access the new app (which soft-launched during the CBA Father’s Day Festival this past summer), visit your iOS app store.
In 2022, Kimber Ludiker was awarded “Mentor of the Year” by the International Bluegrass Music Association…an award well deserved. She has been working very hard to ensure that bluegrass music will survive in the future by exposing our youth to the music and mentoring them so that they can then continue to teach the youth of the future. A self-proclaimed “over achiever,” Kimber has certainly achieved a great deal in a short amount of time and we wish her the best of luck with all of these programs in the future.
