Weiser: Fiddling Capital of the World

The town of Weiser, on the Snake River in western Idaho, is named either for Peter Weiser, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, or for Jacob Weiser, a trapper who struck it rich in the Idaho gold rush of the eighteen sixties. Historians have debated the question for decades without settling it.

What is not debatable is Weiser's singular status in American folk music. In nineteen fifty-three, a local promoter named Blaine Stubblefield talked the city into putting up one hundred seventy-five dollars for a fiddle contest attached to the annual square dance festival. It grew steadily. By nineteen sixty-three, renamed the National Oldtime Fiddlers' Contest during Idaho's territorial centennial, it had become the premier competition of its kind in the country.

Every third week in June, nearly seven thousand people and nearly three hundred fifty fiddlers descend on Weiser High School gymnasium for eight divisions of competition. The town formally bills itself as the Fiddling Capital of the World, and by most measures the title is deserved.