John Boulware

If you have listened to this podcast, you have already heard John Boulware. He wrote the intro music and played fiddle on it, a Slim Pickins tune. The outro is his fiddle too.

Guitar first, then the fiddle

John grew up in Kimball, Tennessee. At a Boy Scout campout he watched a man play "Smoke on the Water" on a guitar and decided it was the coolest thing he had ever seen. Until then, music was something that came out of the radio. His mother had the country station on, his father had classic rock.

He got a guitar for his eleventh birthday. His parents lasted a few weeks of TV jingles picked out by ear, then signed him up for lessons at Opera House Music in South Pittsburg. The teacher who happened to be there was a young Cody Kilby, who showed him a Dylan tune, a Hendrix tune and then "St. Anne's Reel." That was the one. A few months later Kilby left to go on the road with Ricky Skaggs.

The fiddle came next. It ran in the family: his grandfather played in a square dance band in Chester, South Carolina, and John still has his fiddle and the amplifier he ran it through. John started lessons with Bob Townsend, and by 12 he had taken Townsend's place in The Good Old Boys, a band on Monteagle Mountain. He stayed about six years.

"I got along with everyone, but I didn't really have any good friends that I hung out with, because all of my good friends were in their 70s playing bluegrass at the pickings on the weekends."

Playing the contest game

At a small festival in Lynchburg, John entered a fiddle contest on a whim and came third. One of the judges was Jim Wood, who called the Boulware house for weeks until his parents agreed to lessons. They drove an hour and a half each way, every week. John credits Wood with most of what he knows about music.

What followed was a teenage contest career: the 2006 Tennessee State Fiddle Championship, four fiddle wins at Uncle Dave Macon Days, and in 2013, on a whim again, the Alabama State Mandolin Championship. His secret, as he tells it, was knowing what the judges were listening for. Clean and in the groove beats fast.

"Fiddle competitions, when I was growing up, it was really more like a kind of reunion or a gathering that just happened to have a competition going on."

The best part was never the stage. It was jamming in the hallway with the people about to compete against him.

From fiddle to mandolin

John moved to Chattanooga for college at UTC around 2006. The members of Slim Pickins found him teaching at a music store, and he played fiddle with them for years. When several of them formed Randy Steele and the High Cold Wind in 2022, the band needed a mandolin. John filled in, the sound worked, and he stayed. Randy Steele plays banjo and writes the songs, Brad Clark plays guitar, and Justin Hupp plays bass.

"The fiddle is my love. It is my first instrument. It is the language that I speak the most fluently."

Telluride, 2026

The High Cold Wind drove 1,600 miles to the Telluride Band Contest, Randy at the wheel the whole way. It was John's first time west of Texas. On the way up a 200-foot walk at the Continental Divide, he found out what 40 percent less oxygen feels like.

They drew the first slot, the one every band dreads. John did not mind. Order does not change the job. They made the final four and played the main stage, finishing second to the Litch Brothers of Orcas Island, Washington.

"It would not have been as much fun if we went up there and killed it and did a great job, and the other bands were just kind of okay."

The hired gun

John calls himself a mercenary. Most of his shows are with Randy Steele now, but he plays everything: bluegrass, old time, Celtic, swing, rock. He has toured Belgium, France, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Holland, soloed twice with the Murfreesboro Philharmonic, helped arrange the music for a production of Dark of the Moon at the University of the South, and played the Chattanooga Ballet's bluegrass production with the High Cold Wind, where every tune had to match the recording the dancers learned it from, measure for measure. He plays in the house band for the dance categories at the Smithville Fiddlers' Jamboree.

He has turned down road gigs, deliberately, to keep room for the strange and interesting ones.

"I want to leave room for the things that are interesting."

He teaches full time, and has for more than 15 years: fiddle, guitar, mandolin, and one dobro student.

Off the bandstand

He does not play banjo on purpose. Getting good would take the mystery out of it, the same reason he will not learn drums. He loves air drums too much.

He is a hand-tool woodworker, currently building his own kitchen cabinets far more precisely than any kitchen requires. He holds a black belt in Kenpo and a shodan in Iaido. His house-on-fire instruments: a French violin from 1781, a Red Diamond mandolin by Don MacRostie, and a small-bodied guitar by Chris Bozung.