It’s a simple, cozy shop, a little dark in the shadowy corners, brightly illuminated where the sun spills through the front windows.
Chock full of stringed instruments — fiddles, guitars, mandolins, even a dobro — it looks like a musical version of an antique or novelty store. Many of the instruments hang from the walls, others are held in floor stands, still others lean in darkened corners, or against various nooks and crannies. A glass display case holds trophies and mementos, even a belt buckle whose significance would be readily available to old-time bluegrass fans. In between the various instruments hang scads of photos, some of scenes snapped more than five decades ago.
The store — named Vips Violins — is a veritable repository of musical history, decades of collective memories, the combined experiences of generations of musicians stretching far beyond the familiar Blue Ridge Mountains of Surry County.
And in the center of it all is soft-spoken Jim Vipperman, the living, breathing personification of all that is contained in the shop.
Vipperman is known to nearly everyone in Surry County who’s even thought of picking up a stringed instrument. For almost 30 years he’s been giving free weekly musical lessons at Surry Arts Council, through the Traditional Arts Program for Students (known around here simply as the TAPS program). Nearly every third-, fourth-, or fifth-grader who has passed through White Plains, Cedar Ridge, or Jones elementary schools have had a chance to sit and play under his tutelage over the past couple of decades. And for well more than 20 years, Vipperman has been a judge at the Mount Airy Fiddler’s Convention as well as organized the youth competition there and at the annual Tommy Jarrell Festival.
Yet all of that doesn’t quite convey the man’s easy, lifelong partnership with his music.
Really, it’s in his genes, as surely as the DNA code that decided the color of his hair, how tall he’d grow, what food he’d enjoy and dislike.
“I come from seven generations of musicians,” he says of his family, which hails from Meadows of Dan, Virginia. His grandfather, John Willis Vipperman, and his father, Johnny Vipperman, played with some of the most influential musicians in the genre. Jim Vipperman said both his grandfather, with his banjo, and his dad, on guitar, were among the first musicians who played regularly in the early days of WPAQ.
“They were good friends with Ralph Epperson,” he says of his dad, granddad, and their relationship with the founder of the station.
His father also played with the legendary Bill Monroe — thus earning the belt buckle the younger Vipperman keeps in his display case. The only way to earn one of the unique buckles was to be in Monroe’s band, the Blue Grass Boys.
With such a pedigree, Vipperman said there was never really any idea whether he would or would not learn music — he just did it, though his approach might be somewhat unique, in that he doesn’t read music.
“Which is okay, because I do better by ear than by eye,” he says. “If I can hum something, I can play it.”
And he can play it on just about any instrument.
His first official musical lessons came as a second-grader, when he began studying violin.
“In the old days, there was no way to get fiddle lessons,” he said. So, he took a more classical training route on the violin, studying for nearly two years.
That soon morphed into learning to play other stringed instruments, mostly by just trying out an instrument, then working until he could master how to play, with no formal lessons.
He said his dad was a manager at Dixie Music Company, which gave him an opportunity to see a wide variety of instruments.
“I just hung out there and learned as much as I could,” he said. “I got to play on some of the nicest instruments you could ever imagine.”
His desire to own some of those instruments is also what drove him to continue learning.
“My dad said ‘if you learn to play that thing, I’ll get it for you,’” he recalled his father saying many times when the young Vipperman would admire a musical instrument there.
“So, I learned every instrument they had,” he says with a wry smile, starting with the fiddle. That led to Vipperman adding the mandolin, guitar, banjo and bass to his repertoire.
New Interest
It’s not uncommon for young boys, once they reach their teen years, to sometimes stray from their childhood dreams. While he never stopped playing music, Vipperman said when he was about 14, another love came into his life — motor cross.
Once he was on a bike, Vipperman said he was hooked. From then until he was 18, Vipperman said he spent nearly every weekend racing. Even after leaving formal competitive racing for the adult workforce, Vipperman has continued riding regularly. Over the years he’s ridden all sorts of courses — and been in some awful crashes. One, on New Year’s Day 2007, landed him in the hospital with eight broken ribs, a broken collarbone, and a number of other injuries.
Yet he never, for even a second, considered giving up the dare-devilish hobby. Even now, nearly four decades after first climbing on a bike — and after what he casually refers to as more than a half-dozen more broken ribs, a dislocated arm, and assorted other injuries — he still makes regular rides on twisting, climbing motor cross tracks. One of those tracks is even on his own property.
“Instead of owning a farm, I have a motor cross track,” he says with a chuckle.
He’s also worked as a residential and industrial electrician, as well as a carpenter.
Vipperman said his father had hopes that the young Vipperman would become a full-time musician and singer, and even lamented on several occasions his son might have pursued that path had he not become so enamored with the sport of motor cross during his teen years.
But Vipperman said that’s not likely.
“I traveled some in the 1970s,” he said of an early run at being a full-time traveling musician, living mostly out of a station wagon and cheap hotel rooms while touring.
“Unless you’re making big bucks doing it, that’s an awful life. You’re living out of a car, always on the road.”
Still, music has been good to Vipperman. He’s been able to play with the Dillards off and on for 20 years — the band whose members are known widely for their musical acumen, as well as being part of The Darlings on “The Andy Griffith Show.”
He also had the chance to meet with and talk to Andy Griffith, on one of the star’s infrequent trips back to Mount Airy.
“The only reason he wanted to meet me was because he heard I was a public music teacher,” Vipperman said. Given that Griffith got his first taste of performance art in a public school music program, and found a local teacher who helped nurture his fascination with the arts, it’s no wonder he was interested in Vipperman’s work.
“I’m a teacher,” Vipperman says simply of his role in the musical world now. Since 1991 he’s been working with the Surry Arts Council, reaching out into the schools to teach music to local school children. For the past 18 years, he’s been running the TAPS program, where local children and teens can come to get free weekly lessons, utilizing instruments provided by the council.
And in his shop, at 1600 S. Andy Griffith Pkwy, he gives private lessons, though modern technology has taken a bite out of that work.
“I used to give 60 lessons a week,” he said. “Now that’s down to 20 or so.”
Not as many youth or adults are interested in taking musical lessons today, it seems, and among the ones who are, some try utilizing Youtube and other technology to replace in-person teaching.
He’s also seen quite a few of his former students go on to become teachers, thus divvying up the the available student pool into smaller and smaller numbers.
Yet, after all these years, Vipperman, while being a teacher, is the same young man who fell in love with the fiddle all those decades ago.
“I’m still a kid. I haven’t changed very much over the years. I’m getting old, but I’m still the same kid I always was.”
And as long as he can play, Vipperman believes he always will be.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
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