Uncle Pen’s Fiddle

Photos By Jamie Alexander

So says the song that Bill Monroe wrote about his fiddle playing Uncle Pendleton Vandiver, brother to his mother, Malissa.  Speaking of his Uncle Pen in a 1966 radio interview, Monroe said, “He played for a lot of square dances in Kentucky….There wasn’t many musicians around and back in the early days I had to learn to play a guitar; he would let me go along with him to play guitar while he was playing the fiddle….and we’d make from two dollars-and-a-half up to five—never over five dollars a night. So, I really have to give him a lot of credit for my playing and really, I guess, the roots of bluegrass.”¹

So, bluegrass music was born from the sounds that a young Bill Monroe heard come out of his Uncle Pen’s fiddle.   If you visit the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky, you can actually view the exact fiddle that produced the sounds that inspired Bill Monroe and formed the roots of bluegrass.  How cool is that!?

It is not known where Uncle Pen acquired his fiddle, but we do know the story behind how its current owner, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame member Terry Woodward, obtained the fiddle.  But before we talk about how Terry came to own the fiddle, lets back up and talk about how and when the fiddle left Uncle Pen’s possession.

According to an article written by Sara Jane McNulty and published in Bluegrass Unlimited magazine in July of 1992, Pen Vandiver was riding an old mule on a wet and muddy road back in 1930 when the mule, startled by a train, bolted and Pen and the fiddle fell to the ground.  The mule fell on the fiddle and the scroll broke off of the neck.  Pen broke his hip.  Pen, who died two years later in 1932, would walk on crutches the rest of his life.

Pen took the broken fiddle to William Pierce who swapped it with Pen for a fiddle that he owned.  Pierce repaired the broken scroll and put new tuning pegs on the fiddle.  Pierce kept the fiddle until 1972 when he sold it to Otis and Vernon Stogner.  In the BU article from 1992, Otis Stogner is quoted as saying, “There was an old man [William Pierce] that lived in a log house right below my father’s house, and he played the violin, and we played together.  He and his son, Myron Pierce lived together.  They were always repairing guns and everything, all kinds of musical instruments.”²

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To obtain Pen’s fiddle, the Stogner brothers swapped the fiddle that they owned with Pierce for Pen’s fiddle and gave an additional $15.  Otis Stogner said that he and Vernon bought the fiddle because it was a good deal, not because the fiddle belonged to Uncle Pen.   Contingent to making the deal, Pierce insisted that the brothers promise to split the profits with him if they ever sold the fiddle as “Uncle Pen’s fiddle.”  The Stogner brothers kept the fiddle and later, after William Pierce had passed, had William’s son Myron write a certificate verifying that the fiddle had belonged to Uncle Pen.  Terry Woodward now owns this certificate.

The Stogner’s performed with the fiddle until Vernon became ill and passed away in 1936.  At that time Otis retired Pen’s fiddle in memory of his brother.  The fiddle was kept in the family’s possession until they loaned it to the Bluegrass Music Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky, when it first opened in April of 1996.  The term of the loan was four years.  After the four years was up, the Stogner family retrieved the fiddle.  After Otis Stogner passed in 2003 the fiddle became the possession of Stogner’s two daughters.

In about 2007, Owensboro resident Terry Woodward, who was a key player in establishing the Bluegrass Hall of Fame and Museum, asked the question, “What ever happened to Uncle Pen’s fiddle?”  The last he had heard about the fiddle was when it had been restored and played by Kentucky fiddler and luthier Herman Alvey, in 2001, at the dedication of Bill Monroe’s old home place.  Woodward now envisioned it sitting under someone’s bed or in an attic and felt like the fiddle needed to be in a museum.  He reached out to the Stogner sisters and asked if they would be interested in selling the fiddle.  One of the sisters was willing, but the other refused.

Woodward said, “I started calling them about every six months.  That lasted for two years.”  His determination paid off because in 2009 the sisters were finally ready to sell the fiddle.  Once they agreed on a price over the phone, Woodward said, “I was down there in Rosine in 20 minutes.”  Once he took ownership of the fiddle, Woodward gave it, on loan, to the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum where it still resides. 

If you would like to see the instrument that helped birth bluegrass music, plan to make a trip to the Bluegrass Hall of Fame and Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky.  Uncle Pen’s fiddle is just one of the many wonderful bluegrass artifacts that is one display there.