Maddie Denton
A Champion Contest Fiddler Makes Her Name in Bluegrass
Bluegrass music has produced a very long line of phenomenal fiddlers—from Art Wooten, to Tommy Magness, Howdy Forrester, Chubby Wise, Jim Shumate, Benny Martin, Vassar Clements, Kenny Baker, Paul Warren, Curly Ray Cline, Bobby Hicks, Byron Berline…the list goes on and on and on. And the legacy of the bluegrass fiddler continues to this day as each generation has passed on all that they have brought to this music to the younger musicians. Every player has mentored younger players and as those players mature, they mentor the generation that is coming up behind them.
While many fans look back with fond remembrances to those wonderful fiddler players of the past, those who are paying close attention to today’s new bands recognize that the young players coming along today posses every bit of the talent and skill that the seasoned veterans had back when they were getting started in the business. One of those young bluegrass fiddle players who is currently making a big name for herself in Nashville, and beyond, is Maddie Denton. Maddie acknowledges that her success is due to fiddlers who have helped her along the way. Maddie said, “I have appreciated everyone who has helped me along my journey.”
Currently, Maddie is playing for two of the most exciting young bands in Nashville—East Nash Grass and The Theo & Brenna Band. Additionally, she has recently started touring with The Dan Tyminski Band. Performing with Nashville’s top young musicians is a great achievement, but to be selected by Dan Tyminski—who has spent a good portion of his career standing on stage with Alison Krauss playing fiddle—says a lot about Maddie’s talents.
The Contest Years
Maddie Denton grew up in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her maternal grandfather, Clyde Lewis, was a fiddler who played for local square dances in and around his Alexandria, Tennessee home. Her mother, Marcia Lewis Denton, was—and still is—a contest fiddler. Maddie started learning how to play the fiddle when she was about five years old.
When asked if she learned from her mother, Maddie said, “Although I was from this musical family, they never forced me or anything. I thought that what they were doing was really cool and I wanted to try. My mom sat down with me one day and tried to teach me ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ and I think there was some frustration from both parties involved. It didn’t take long to realize that I should probably get a professional fiddle teacher that was not my mom, although my mom did teach fiddle lessons out of our house for a good portion of my childhood. My first fiddle teacher was Jim Wood who lives about an hour south of Murfreesboro. I took lesson from him for about ten years. My parents would drive me down there once a week.”
Jim Wood was a contest fiddler who won the Tennessee state fiddle championship five times. Seventeen of his students have gone on to win either state or national fiddle titles and at one point he had taught lessons to Maddie’s mother. Maddie grew up going to fiddle contests with her family. Her mother entered the contests and her father backed her mother up on the guitar. Maddie remembers going to the nearby Smithville Fiddler’s Jamboree every year and meeting other young musicians that were about her age such as Sierra Hull, Cory Walker, and Seth Taylor.
Maddie entered her first contest when she was seven years old and this past year (2021) was the first year since that time that she has not entered a contest. Contest highlights during those years include being the 2016 Grand Master Fiddle Champion and the 2009 National Junior Fiddle Champion. Since 2008 she has won fourteen state championship titles in the states of Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia, and Tennessee. Part of the reward for winning the Grand Masters was a spot on the Grand Ole Opry.
One of the biggest contests for fiddle players is the National Oldtime Fiddler’s Contest & Festival in Weiser, Idaho. Maddie and her family participated in this contest eight times over the years. When she was in the junior-junior division (ages 8 to 12), Maddie placed fifth when she was eleven and third when she was twelve. She then placed second in the junior division when she was fourteen and then won that division when she was fifteen. In 2019 Maddie’s mother place second in the senior division and Maddie placed fifth in the grand champion division.
Growing up—from the time she started competing at the age of seven to the time she was eleven—Maddie’s fiddle style was indicative of the contest style popular in the southeastern part of the United States. During those years, when she attended large contests such as the one in Weiser, Idaho, she noticed that the fiddlers who were doing well in these contests were using the Texas style of fiddling, so she decided to switch and learn Texas style. To do so she borrowed recordings of Terry Morris, Shorty Chancellor, and Benny Thomasson from Bill Jones. She also started taking lessons from Daniel Carwile. Maddie said, “Daniel was one of my favorite contest fiddle players growing up. Daniel’s student Doug Fleener and I were trading victories in the southeast fiddle contests. I figured ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,’ and I took a few lessons with Daniel in Lexington, Kentucky and emersed myself in everything Texas. Daniel also helped me organize my rounds and gave me pointers on playing contests.”
Regarding his time working with Maddie, Daniel Carwile said, “Maddie is one of the most determined and disciplined students I have ever worked with. She was already playing at a high level when we started. I simply gave her some pointers on bowing patterns and technique, groove, arrangements, and contest strategy. She took the ball and ran with it, winning the National Junior title, numerous state championships, and the Grand Master Fiddler Contest. I am very proud of Maddie. Her current CD is amazing! I look forward to future projects.”
Maddie describes the fiddle style that she played as a young fiddler as “kind of bouncy with quick bowing technique—not a ton of slurred bows.” Of the Texas style, she said, “The Texas style is downbeat-oriented and is smoother.” Although she admits that it was tough to make the transition in styles, she felt like the Texas style was what the judges were looking for in the contests. She made the transition in styles when she was about twelve years old. The Texas style continues to dominate in contests to this day. Maddie said, “In March I judged the Kentucky state contest and the top players performed the Texas style. The Appalachian and bluegrass style contestants did not do as well.”
When asked if her contest tune repertoire changed when she switched fiddle styles, she said that, for the most part, she kept with the same tunes but just played different versions. Her “go to” contest tunes have been tunes like “Tom & Jerry,” “Say Old Man,” “Beaumont Rag,” and “Black & White Rag.”
Growing up as a contest style fiddler, Maddie was hesitant to play any bluegrass. She said, “Ryan Holladay asked me to play fiddle in a bluegrass band for a band contest when I was in high school. I had listened to Stuart Duncan, Sam Bush, and Alison Krauss, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t play in B. I didn’t start trying to play bluegrass until I was in college.”
Golf
As if practicing the fiddle and traveling to contests wasn’t enough to fill her young life, Maddie was also an athlete. She started playing golf with her father at the age of seven and was also involved with basketball and volleyball. She played on her high school golf and basketball teams, forgoing volleyball since it shared the season with golf and she felt like she had a better chance of getting a college scholarship in golf. Evidently, that was a wise decision because she did get offered scholarships from several colleges to play golf. She decided to attend Middle Tennessee State University because it had the best golf program. At MTSU she was offered a preferred walk-on status with the promise of a scholarship, which started her second year. The MTSU golf team won back-to-back conference championships during Maddie’s junior and senior years. During one tournament at the University of Missouri, Maddie shot a six under par round, which is in the record books as the second lowest round of golf in MTSU history.
During her college years Maddie was practicing golf four hours every day, but still found some time to mix in a little fiddle because she took golf lessons from none other than Johnny Warren of the Earls of Leicester (Paul Warren’s son). Maddie said, “He was my swing coach for several years during college and now I recommend him to all my kids that I coach at Siegel High School (I’m the assistant golf coach) that are looking to take their game to the next level. Johnny helped me a ton with my golf game, but we also found time each lesson to talk about playing the fiddle, and one time he even brought his dad’s fiddle (Paul Warren) and let me play a tune after we finished my lesson. That was really special.”
Bluegrass
After four years of playing competitive golf in college Maddie said that during her senior year she started to “get the itch to play bluegrass.” During a New Year’s Eve party on the eve of 2016, Maddie attended her first bluegrass jam session and said, “I was hooked. There was no turning back!” She said that Megan Lynch Chowning, another highly successful contest fiddler who has become fluent in many styles of fiddling, gave Maddie some help transitioning from contest fiddling to bluegrass. Maddie said, “Megan taught me some tricks to help me play in difficult keys and she made me feel like I wasn’t stupid for not being able to do it right away. She was kind and patient and taught me that it was OK to fall on my face because it was a brand new thing. She helped me a ton.”
Regarding Maddie’s fiddle playing, Megan Lynch Chowning said, “Maddie Denton was always an incredible contest fiddler. She was meticulous in her execution and played with drive and commitment. These days, she brings all of those attributes to her bluegrass fiddling and mixes them with a sizable amount of progressive creativity as well as reverence for the tradition. I think it’s this unique combination of influences and experiences that really sets her apart. She’s always been hard to beat, and now she’s even harder to forget.”
While she was in college, Maddie started out as a jazz studies major, which she said helped her learn about improvisation. She later switched to biology and now has a day job teaching biology at Siegel High School in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. As mentioned previously, she is also a member of East Nash Grass, The Theo & Brenna Band, and the Dan Tyminski Band.
Maddie joined East Nash Grass in the summer of 2018. The band has long had a residency at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison, Tennessee. In the spring of 2018 she was invited to sit in with the band when their regular fiddle player was not able to play. The first night Maddie sat in with the band, Molly Tuttle also sat in and played with them. From there she kept on filling in for several weeks and was then offered the position full time.
Maddie got her job with The Theo & Brenna Band in the spring of 2018, just a short time before joining East Nash Grass. They called to ask her to play a gig at the Station Inn in Nashville and she has been with the band ever since. Maddie, an only child, stated that the siblings Theo and Brenna are now “like the siblings I never had.” Maddie said that Theo, who is also a fiddle player, had some ideas about the way he wanted the fiddle to sound on his original tunes. She said, “A lot of his songs were fiddle-driven, which meant that I had to learn a lot of kicks and parts he’d written out because he heard very specific lines in his head. I wanted to make sure that the music he envisioned was what was coming out for people to hear. That was very important to me and I feel like it’s my duty when I play other people’s original music. It truly is an honor to be chosen by someone to bring their songs to life. I don’t ever want to take that for granted, so I worked hard learning that material.”
The call to play in the Dan Tyminski band came in May of 2020. Maddie said that it was “huge” for her to get a call from Tyminski because she had been listening to Dan with Alison Krauss since she was in high school and she has also been a fan of Adam Steffey’s music (Adam is also in the band). She said, “If you had of told high school Maddie that she would be playing with Dan Tyminski, she would have laughed at you!”
Regarding the initial connection from Tyminski, Maddie said that one day, out of the blue, she got a friend request on Facebook from Tyminski. She was shocked, but friended back. A couple of days later she got a message from Dan that said, “We need a fiddle player and harmony singer, would you be down?” Dan followed up with a phone call and asked her to be in the band. Maddie said, “I found out later that Adam Steffey had told Kevin McKinnon that they were looking for a fiddle player.” Kevin had seen Maddie play fiddle on an Instagram video. The band listened to Maddie’s video and Dan gave her a call.
The first encounter with Dan, and the band, came when Dan picked up Maddie and they drove to a band meeting in Galax, Virginia. Maddie said, “So, I hopped in the car with one of my heroes and drove six hours to meet the band. I told Dan ‘Thanks for the audition!’ He said, ‘This isn’t an audition. You are in the band.’”
When asked about having Maddie in his band, Dan Tyminski said, “I am a tremendous fan of Maddie’s fiddle playing. Ultimately, when I play music with someone, I want them to react appropriately in the context of what they play. Maddie has an inner sense of what to play that keeps me on edge and excites me. She has an aggressive attitude with bluegrass fiddle that I love. She has just started to find herself and she is just going to get better.”
The Solo Recording
One of the projects that Maddie worked on during the COVID shutdown was a solo album. She said that she had always wanted to record a solo project, but had never found the time. Her teaching schedule at the high school during the pandemic allowed her the time to go into the studio. She recorded the album, titled Playin’ In This Town, at Jake Stargel’s recording studio. She said, “Jake is the most patient person. We mixed it together and I’m a bit of a perfectionist. Jake is the guy in Nashville that most of my friends use.”
In order to help her with the recording, Maddie recruited her East Nash Grass bandmates, plus Jake Stargel on lead guitar. The CD is a mix of instrumental tunes and vocals. Three of the instrumental tunes are a breakdown, a waltz, and a “tune of choice” as they require in fiddle contests. One of the vocals, “Within My Heart,” was written and sung by Maddie. Regarding this song Maddie, said, “I guess I just got depressed one day. I started thinking about what I would ever do without my mom. What if my mom is not here one day and I still am? I wrote this song about that.” This album, as well as the album by East Nash Grass, was reviewed in the December 2021 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited.
Maddie’s early years on the fiddle saw her excelling at the southeastern style of contest fiddling. From there, she added the Texas style and—if her contest results are any an indication—she mastered that as well. Later, she added the bluegrass style. Today she says that her style of fiddle playing is a hybrid—or what she humbly referred to as a “confused style.” She said, “It is a mesh of everything.”
Along the way, Maddie has received help from a bunch of older and more experienced players—her mother and grandfather, Jim Wood, Bill Jones, Daniel Carwile, Johnny Warren, and Megan Lynch Chowning, just to name a few. So, we see that the legacy of contest and bluegrass fiddling is still being handed down. And with Maddie Denton, that legacy is in very good hands.
