(Over the course of the week, the Lincoln Parish Journal is republishing some of its most memorable stories from the past year … some of our readers favorites).
By Kyle Roberts
WEST MONROE, LA. — Don’t tell Elbert Lawrence he can’t do something.
After all, he’s a long-time lumber man turned private investigator turned…. fiddle maker?
And he’s chosen a route that dozens of “experts” told him wasn’t possible: a violin constructed completely out of sinker cypress – and from wood that’s older than Jesus of Nazareth.
Lawrence’s fiddle story starts at Duck Commander in West Monroe, La., nearly 15 years ago. At the time, Lawrence’s Specialty Lumber sold some of his lumber to the legendary family for their duck calls, and noted the type of wood they looked for when building their craft — specifically, boards that had tight growth rings for better call sounds.
It got Lawrence thinking: if that’s good enough for the Robertson’s craft, why would it’s be good for other instruments? If they could make their world-class duck calls from his wood, why not a violin?
“I contacted, probably, ten luthiers (violin-makers) all over the United States, and they all laughed at me,” Lawrence said. “They all said it couldn’t be done.”
So Lawrence needed to find a believer. Enter R.V. Couch from Jena, La., who has made his own violins, madolins and guitars for almost three decades. In fact, the violin in Northwestern State University’s Hall of Fame in Natchitoches, La., was built by Couch.
Violins have been constructed for around five centuries, starting in Italy. In that time, the construction has primarily been the same: a head made of spruce and a body of maple. Grains of the wood would have to be quarter sawed, meaning cypress is likely to split rather than be bent for the crown.
“I know Cypress wood splits really easily, ” Couch said. “I was afraid that even if I built it, would it last a week, or six weeks, maybe?”
Couch, however, and despite some of his own misgivings at the start, ended up working magic. After two years, the “Lawrence-Couch Violin” was born in 2013 — a first of its kind and modeled after the Stradivarius Model 1720. And, while most violins are a mahogany color, this one is a lighter shade of brown since the wood has been submerged underwater for millennia.
“When you’ve got wood underwater and depending on which river it’s in — that’s going to be what determines the color,” Lawrence said. “We don’t have this kind of clear sinker-cypress in Louisiana because we’ve got a lot of chemicals in our rivers. But in Florida, they don’t have chemicals, plus they have a sandy bottom, so the wood stays pretty much the same as it was whenever it first went in the water.
“And this wood came from a tree over 2,500 years old. It’s really, really old, and you have to have a magnifying glass to count the wood rings in this fiddle.”
The fiddle has been played by 2014 Louisiana State Fiddle Champion winner, 12-year-old Carson Taylor. It’s also been all over Nashville, Tenn., where it came back with a huge appraisal. Even so, Lawrence wisely isn’t selling his fiddle for a dime yet – he currently has a pantent pending on this particular violin and any string instrument built by sinker woods. Lawrence noted that he has been more willing to show his violin publicly now that in the twelve years that the violin has been built, the sinker cypress has held true with no splitting.
Kirby Rambin of Monroe, La., is a professional violin and fiddle player and played the Lawrence-Couch violin at the Q94.1 FM studios in Ruston, La. Being the pro he is, he can tell the difference between a traditional violin and the one built from sinker cypress wood.
“It has a softer tone, but it still cuts,” Rambin said. “It just has a really easy feel to it. It’s got more of a chest voice than a falsetto like other violins. It’s so much fuller and rich.”
Click the play button below to hear a sample of the Lawrence-Couch violin by Rambin.
