California State Old Time Open Fiddle & Picking Championships (Lodi)

Each April the state’s old-time fiddlers take the stage in Jackson Hall, at 413 E. Lockeford Street on the Lodi Grape Festival Fairgrounds, for the championship of the California State Old Time Fiddlers Association. Admission to the competition is free. A contestant plays alone or with as many as three accompanists, and the accompanists may use only acoustic instruments. The association has eleven districts across the state. Its District 1, in Oroville, goes by the Oroville Old-Time Fiddlers and holds public circle jams on Myers Street on the fourth Sunday of the month.

Two days in Jackson Hall

The association’s district pages set the 2026 championships, the 58th, for April 17 and 18. The Lodi News-Sentinel’s day-by-day schedule also opens on Friday, April 17, though one line of the paper’s preview gives April 18 and 19. Ted Kuster, president of the California Bluegrass Association’s board, told the paper to expect about 100 competitors, aged 7 to 93.

Friday belongs to the oldest players. The Senior-Senior division is for fiddlers older than 70 and the Senior division for those 55 to 69. Preliminaries begin at 4 p.m. and finals at 6. The evening closes with the Anything Goes round, in which contestants may play anything with which they can make music. Saturday starts at 8:15 a.m. and runs twelve hours through every other bracket: adults, young adults, juniors, junior-juniors, and pee-wees. Twin Fiddles competitions fill the afternoon, and awards are given out at 9 p.m.

The 2026 contest brought new rules. Contestants had always been given as much time as they needed to reach the stage after their names were called, and now they had three minutes. Second-round play in Open Fiddling was held to five minutes and Anything Goes to four. A Jr. Jr. Picking Division was added for contestants younger than 12.

The association posts its certified winners. In 2025 they were Mikki Feeney in Senior-Senior, Sheri Eby in Senior, Ada Torge in Pee Wee (Small Fry), Robin Sorensen in Junior-Junior, Noemi Blacklock in Junior, Gracie Benham in Young Adult, Eric Anderson in Adult, and Lucy Crary in Open.

Coffee and jams on the fairgrounds

Those winners come out of a week of playing outdoors. The California Bluegrass Association’s Spring Campout leads up to the championships, and in 2026 it was in its ninth year, running April 14 to 19. By the News-Sentinel’s count it draws about 250 guests a year, from age 8 to 80 and from novices to masters. Bluegrass is the host’s music, but a walk through the grounds also turns up old time, gospel, Americana folk, and swing jazz. Playing usually starts at about 10 a.m. and can go on into the early morning hours. Campers get a warm entree each evening and hot black coffee twice a day, free. Middle and high school teachers from Lodi and Stockton bring students out on field trips.

“When they’re done playing, they’ll all go out into the fairgrounds and play with anybody,” Kuster said of the contestants. “The thing about bluegrass is that it’s all about amateurs picking with other amateurs, and forming friendships.”

An eighty-year-old home from Weiser

The contest began with a trip to Idaho. The association’s own history says that in June 1963 Grant Spangenberg, an 80-year-old fiddler living in California, went to the contest at Weiser and took fourth place in the Senior division. He came home resolved to start a regional contest in California. He began the work with friends from his house in Oroville, and ill health moved him to nearby Paradise the following year. The history calls him the “founder” and his granddaughter, Redella Calkins, the organizer. Their circle was a small friendship group that met now and then in one another’s homes to fiddle.

Calkins wrote to Weiser for information on its association and its judging. In February 1966 she drew up bylaws, which members accepted that month at a regular meeting in Paradise. In March, Governor Edmund G. Brown accepted the honorary chairmanship. From her living room she sent out news releases for a nationally certified contest to be held in April with Paradise’s Gold Nugget Days Festival. She also asked Butte County businesses to sponsor it. Real estate offices, motels, restaurants, and bars, split about evenly, bought most of the ads in the souvenir program.

On April 23, 1966, the fiddlers marched in the Gold Nugget Days afternoon parade, then sat down to a jam session and Miners Stew. The next day the first state contest held its preliminaries and finals in the Paradise Recreation Center, open to fiddlers 18 and older. Weiser’s rules applied. Each appearance called for a hoedown, a waltz, and a tune of choice, no tune could be repeated, and every tune had to be at least 50 years old. California’s one change was to play the tune of choice first. First place went to Floyd Chilton of Oroville, a Missourian whom other California fiddlers counted a foremost authority because of the number of old tunes he knew. He won $100, a trophy, $100 toward a trip to the National Finals at Weiser, and his picture in the Hall of Fame. Spangenberg also played in the contest.

Oroville, Madera, and the year 1911

The second contest, in April 1967, ran two days and was judged “Weiser style” by “remote control.” The judges sat in another room, so they could hear a fiddler without seeing the showmanship. A vacant Safeway store served as the hospitality house. Over 100 musicians and 50 fiddlers came in spite of bad weather. Harold Allen won the Open State title, and Delbert McGrath, the top Californian, went on to represent the state at Weiser.

In May 1968 the state contest moved to Oroville, where it was held with the Oroville Regatta Days Celebration. By 1969 the association considered Oroville its home. That year 35 fiddlers competed and about 450 people attended the finals. The bulletin editor, Hattie Hall, wrote that the 1970 contest held several surprises. The schedule had been planned for 50 fiddlers, only a third of that number came, and the association bore the cost alone. Edith Thompson, aunt to Arlene Lommen, served as Master of Ceremonies for the first time, and June Giles and Joan Foster worked the kitchen. Virgil Evans of Saratoga won the Regular division and, with it, the state title.

Much of the judging in these years followed Kelley Kirksey of Santa Rosa, a retired Los Angeles policeman and former fiddler who was now blind. In 1966 he had set out to standardize old-time contest judging. His revised scoring weighed old-time fiddling ability at 40 percent, rhythm or timing at 30, and tone quality at 30. For the April 1972 contest in the Oroville Municipal Auditorium he added a rule that every tune must date before 1911, the year the history gives for the beginning of song copyrighting in America. That year women could enter the Regular division for the first time, as well as their own. Outside the hall, younger fiddlers played bluegrass for the crowd of “longhairs.”

In 1973 the state championship went south to Madera. The history says this apparently happened because most active members by then lived in Sacramento or down the San Joaquin Valley. Oroville’s spring contest became the first annual Northern California Regional. That same year Frank Knight, the 81-year-old fiddler and bagpipe player from Paradise, died of a heart attack, and the monthly bulletin finally got a name, The Sound Post. In 1974 Spangenberg’s name appeared again on its letterhead.

Down Highway 99 to Lodi

The News-Sentinel gives a shorter account. It ties the 1966 founding to the postwar boom in bluegrass, folk, and country music. In the paper’s telling, the contest traveled from city to city along the Highway 99 corridor and then settled in Oroville, where it was held for three decades. In 2019 organizers moved it to Lodi, hoping for new blood among competitors and audience. Lodi is closer to the Bay Area than Oroville and central in the state, and organizers hoped it would draw people who had not been able to come before.

Kuster places the new site on old ground. “The area around Stockton was ground zero for the heart of bluegrass in California in the 1950s,” he said. “People from states like Arkansas and Oklahoma came to California, they settled in the Stockton area, and brought their music with them.”