The Fuzzy Fiddler Mission:
Proceeds from Fuzzy Fiddler Merch Sales go towards helping vets and first responders with PTSD. After leaving Hattiesburg last year, I began to think and pray real hard about my purpose here in life. I was inspired by a good friend to take up cause in helping vets and first responders with PTSD by providing access to an artistic/creative outlet as a coping mechanism. My
goal is to put instruments and training in people's hands and minds that desire to learn music and have served our communities and country in uniformed service. Since conceiving this idea I have been approached by multiple men and women in service with no prompt by me, purely coincidence. I have four veterans in my local area who have expressed interest in learning violin, who I have been volunteering time to. Three of them need instruments of their own, so my short term goal is to raise money through merch sales to help purchase instruments for my current students. Hopefully in the future I can expand my reach to take on more students, present workshops and retreats with other teachers, build up a supply of instruments at the ready to donate and create something special for those who have served and could benefit from having a positive creative outlet. If you read this far thank you and please consider giving Fuzzy Fiddler your support by clicking the "Shop" option at the top of the page. ❤️💜❤️
About the Artist:
Thomas Jenkins (aka Fuzzy Fiddler) was born in a blizzard on the first day of winter, 1983 in Shreveport, Louisiana. Arriving prematurely due to complications, Jenkins was literally born "blue", and remained so the first few days of his life. Growing up, Jenkins played, hunted, fished, and worked in the backwoods of South Mississippi near the Louisiana border. He picked up the violin at age 8, having asked Santa for one for Christmas after reading stories in school of children who played the instrument. After briefly taking lessons and becoming frustrated and bored with conventional teaching methods, he quit and abandoned hope of learning to play. At age 12, the transition to adolescence proved to be challenging socially and academically and he was grounded for several months from receiving failing grades. Being grounded from everything electronic save the radio, Jenkins one day saw the instrument case propped in the corner of his room and decided he was going to learn the songs off the radio by ear, one way or another. Using the Record/Play buttons of the cassette deck, he would capture country songs onto tape and play the fiddle solo sections over and over until they were memorized. In addition, he would always sleep with the radio on either the local country stations or NPR. In middle school, Jenkins picked up French horn as there were no string programs in the area. This would take him through college on scholarship, winning multiple awards and honors on the instrument along the way. For a time he would dream of being a soloist playing with the symphony and would record the horn concerti that would play occasionally on NPR and attempt to learn them by ear. At age 15, Jenkins played his first professional "h***y tonk" gig at the Picayune American Legion. From there, he began a balance between school and music career. At 18, he got his first national touring gig with David Church, a Hank Williams Sr. impersonator, after meeting and performing together at the Annual Hank Williams Festival in Georgiana, Alabama. At age 21, Jenkins dropped out of music school and came home to help care for his father, Ory, who had developed lung cancer and emphysema. During that time he took on a position as corrections officer at the town police department to later be promoted to patrol officer, working nights and taking his father to chemo in the mornings afterwards. After his father's passing in 2006, Jenkins moved to Ohio to pursue a gig which ultimately fell through, but by chance he would meet Brett Robinson, famed steel player of Wh**ey Morgan and the 78s while working in the same industrial manufacturing plant. This friendship ultimately led to Jenkins' first "big show" in 2012, playing fiddle for the 78s in the Birmingham arena as the opener for Bob Seger for a crowd of around 15,000. In 2010, Jenkins dropped out of music school for the third and final time and began playing music full time with the band Autumn Rise-N and then joined Wes Loper in 2011. In 2012, Jenkins suffered a neck and shoulder injury from over-practice for the Louisiana State Grand Master's Fiddle Championship but would later overcome it to take the win in 2013. Jenkins dropped his first studio produced full-length solo album, Parish Line, in 2014 featuring Redd Volkaert on guitar, Cindy Cashdollar on dobro, and Bruce Bouton on pedal steel. He would go on to self-produce two more albums, Real Damn Country, and "Art of the Breakdown". Jenkins began touring with Sammy Kershaw in the spring of 2015, which for him meant a move to Nashville. He lived on the tour bus with a band and staff of 12, four nights a week, travelling the country playing the music he had learned by recording to cassette decades ago with one of the very people that made it. In 2016 Jenkins moved back home and briefly became a fixture in the popular Florabama act, Big Earl and the Sexual Biscuits before having a resurgence of back, neck, and shoulder problems, which would ultimately force him off the circuit for several years. (This did not stop him from landing a finalist position in the 2016 National Grand Master's Fiddle Championship in Nashville.) During next couple years, he began teaching himself mandolin and also improving his guitar technique. This was also the time in which his business/brand, "Fuzzy Fiddler" was conceived in an effort to try to make ends meet while coping with chronic pain and not being able to play by making and selling beard wax. In a couple years time, Jenkins was able to rehabilitate himself back to playing violin and was now also a bona fide multi-instrumentalist. Fall of 2019, Jenkins was invited to be a member of the Tony-Ray Thompson Band for a residency in New Orleans at the Bourbon Street H***y Tonk. There the band helped the bar break multiple sales records and what started as a 1 month residency turned into 4 months with an open invitation to return. The following year, after several months in lockdown, Jenkins made a move to Lower Alabama and began working more on singing lead and playing guitar while in order to be able to get some of the limited available gigs and has begun playing solo shows in Hattiesburg and Downtown Mobile. In addition, he is working to rebuild his brand Fuzzy Fiddler to support his craft and also his philanthropic efforts to teach and put instruments into the hands of vets and first responders.
