A Violin Maker and His Apprentice Keep a Storied Tradition Alive

He grew up in Chicago. 

She grew up in Nashville. 

He’s a lifelong carpenter who’d just as well live in the woods. 

She’s a former gymnast who fell under the spell of violin while training in ballet classes.

It would seem they don’t have that much in common. Except, that is, for the fact that they both want to make violins, and they’re both outsiders at doing it. An unlikely friendship has formed at the workbench where Ray DeMeo passes on an ancient craft, and in the process both he and his apprentice Amanda N. Ewing aim to make their work — and the music their work helps create — more accessible. 

For DeMeo’s part, he’s not the picture of a refined luthier one might imagine training among European masters. When he’s not tinkering with tiny violin parts, he’s likely to be wielding a chainsaw and building a post-and-beam house. He’s a hunter, fisherman and veteran, an Italian-American who grew up in the city and fled to the woods of Alaska for many years. He later drove an 18-wheeler 350,000 miles across Canada and the United States to save money for violin school. And even though he also makes guitars, violas, cellos and other stringed instruments, he laughs about a salesperson at a Nashville guitar shop recently warning him not to touch the expensive instruments. “Why am I a violin maker?” he asks. “Where I grew up [in Chicago] means you’re either gonna be a cop or a mobster or a firefighter.” 

Ewing is apprenticing in a trade that is traditionally male-dominated. She also scours the internet for faces of luthiers at workshops and conferences who look like her, a black woman. But almost to a one, they’re white. She searches for stories too, like the legend of a former slave who had to carve his master’s name in the violins he built to get them sold. She’s also created a Facebook page called Luthiers of Color. So far it has three members — and she’s one of them. 

Ewing, 38, met DeMeo, 61, in a group of violin players. 

During one session, DeMeo brought his tools to make some repairs. “It was like somebody was about to have surgery but on instruments,” says Ewing. “When I saw him there with all his stuff, I was like, ‘This is so dope.’ ” 

Ewing hadn’t been particularly happy with the sound of her instrument, though she didn’t know exactly why. “I thought, ‘I wonder if I can afford to have my own violin made,’ ” she says. But as one question led to another, her intrigue blossomed. “I think I remember him saying, ‘Are you for-real interested in this?’ ”

Within a month, Ewing began making the two-hour-plus round trip every Sunday from Nashville to Nunnelly, Tenn., passing old barns and pastures full of sleepy cows. For more than a year now, she’s sat with DeMeo at his workbench. On this day, their scribbled notes and tools lie next to a bouquet of jonquils in a Publix-brand olive jar transformed into a vase. 

“I’m learning all the areas I need to improve upon in my life,” Ewing says while studying the pencil marks on the edge of a future violin. 

“And I’m still improving upon them too,” DeMeo adds. 

On average, it takes 250 hours, about 56 parts and a host of tiny problems and precise details to make a violin. Not everyone who sets out to do it will accomplish it.

“So many try and fail,” DeMeo says. “Well, they just stop. Engineers, doctors — a lot of people. You have to have humility right off the bat.” 

DeMeo says it’s essential to have a human on the other side of the bench from you, not just a YouTube tutorial or a book. The process takes time and can’t be rushed. 

“It’s a lot of information,” Ewing says. “When I first started coming here, I would leave with headaches.”

After the patterns, cutting and chiseling comes a critical point in the process — bending the curved ribs on the middle part of the instrument. 

“Did I break one?” Ewing asks DeMeo.

“You did,” he says. “I broke one too.” 

Then after working quietly and patiently for a while, she shows him her work. 

“If I do anything else to this corner, I’m gonna have a nervous breakdown,” she says.  

“Define ...” DeMeo begins, and then Ewing finishes his sentence: “Define nervous breakdown?” 

And still, she continues with his encouragement. As Ewing will tell you, DeMeo doesn’t really answer questions in a small way. Rather, he’ll give you the big-picture explanation, which also might include a sidebar into the migration patterns of sand cranes in Alaska and the way a moose chews on a stalk of fireweed. He blames it on being over 60 and Italian. 

When it comes to violins, the conversation often goes back to the trees they come from, and eventually to the spiritual nature of the process. 

“It’s very much my religion,” DeMeo says. “Violins come from the forest, you know.” He explains that he considered a forestry degree and worked a couple summers with the forestry service. “Everything I do comes from the forest.”

It’s where he feel safe, he says, more so than in the city. He describes trees as alive but silent, and says making them into violins gives them voice.

“The best way for me to honor a tree — and the tree’s maker — is through a violin. Then there’s the music aspect of it. Creating this thing out of wood, and off it goes.

“The fiddle she’s making could very well surpass her and has the potential to be heard for a hundred years out of that box,” DeMeo continues. “Once this instrument is made and out there, it makes lots of people happy.” 

DeMeo started making instruments at age 15. He had good woodworking teachers in high school and lived near a park with a public wood shop. His father worked as a machinist and allowed him to use equipment in the basement. DeMeo visited music stores as a kid, bringing with him rulers, pencils and erasers to trace patterns. He gawked at ancient instruments in Chicago’s museums.

“Even back then, I was amazed,” he says. “I never thought I could learn it, but I knew I would try.” So he read books at the public library and showed up with pockets full of quarters to make copies. It’s how he taught himself to make a lute that got him disqualified from a contest in high school — he says the judges didn’t believe he made it. 

About 25 years ago, after years of carpentry, DeMeo went to school for violin repair in Minnesota. He convinced his instructor to teach him how to make violins on the side. “You have to have all your work in and can’t miss days, and you have to get good grades,” he remembers her telling him — yes, he learned from a woman. But he’d driven a truck for three years to save for tuition and a year’s mortgage while attending repair school. He had more determination than she might have bargained for. She taught DeMeo enough to send him on to further training with masters — one Polish and another a Cambodian refugee.

Jennifer Halenar, a Nashville-based luthier at J. Halenar Violins and a violin repairwoman by day at The Violin Shop, says it’s not easy to find a place to apprentice for violin making. It’s the path she took, like DeMeo and like Ewing. But it’s easier to go to school — if you can afford it. Halenar says only about three schools geared toward making the instruments exist in North America (in addition to shorter-term workshops), and those cost about $80,000. 

As for being a female in the craft, Halenar says she began going to a luthier workshop in Ohio in 2010. She remembers meeting about five women out of 50 violin makers there. The next time she went, there were seven or eight. “It’s definitely increased quite a bit in last 10 years,” she says. But she’s never known a luthier of color. “It’s great to hear that the first one I hear of is a female too.”

Ewing first learned to play violin about seven years ago at the Allegro School of Music upstairs in Inglewood Baptist Church in East Nashville. She enrolled her daughter in piano and herself in violin. 

Ewing attended Stratford High School, and she recalls a piano and band instruments as part of the school’s music program, but she doesn’t recall stringed instruments. She doesn’t see them in her three kids’ schools either. And that’s part of why Ewing and DeMeo want to make instruments and their craft more accessible. 

“Especially in public schools,” she says. “Funding is cut. There may not be music programs. There may not be great instruments or instruments that are well-taken-care-of. … We may be missing out on some really great musicians — some great female musicians and musicians of color — just because they never had the opportunity to hold a great instrument and have some instruction, because it’s not available really, because of money.”  

But Ewing knows she’s getting ahead of herself for now. She must first finish her violin. And while DeMeo faces some health problems, he’s determined to see her through. 

“These are gonna be really nice violins, man,” he says. “They’re gonna be monsters.” 

Ewing protests this statement, but not because she doesn’t think the instruments will be great. 

“I actually don’t want them to be monsters,” she says. “Maybe baby elephants.”

And then through their banter, DeMeo’s softer side rears its head again. He waxes poetic about the various shapes of harmonic clouds that can float from the body of a finished instrument. 

“Is this just a dead piece of wood?” he asks. “Maybe. But it ain’t gonna be. It’s a new life.”

Follow DeMeo and Ewing on Instagram (@lovinglydemeoviolins). Ewing encourages fellow luthiers of color to hashtag their photos #luthiersofcolor.