Melvin Wine (April 20, 1909 – March 16, 2003) was an American Appalachian fiddler from the state of West Virginia.
[3] His grandfather John Nelson "Nels" Wine was not a string musician but learned to whistle and sing his father's tunes.
[2] At age 13, Wine won a fiddler's contest held in Gassaway, West Virginia, beating the longtime champion, an older man named Bailey.
Mr. Bailey told Melvin he was having a hard time making a living, so Wine gave him the contest prize money.
[6] During the Great Depression, Melvin and his brother Clarence performed together away from Copen in restaurants and bars, and over regional radio.
[3] As a young adult, Wine was performing at a party where he witnessed a man drop dead after swearing at a woman.
[2] He has also been recognized for his versatility on the fiddle and is "renowned for his deft bow work, and the immensity of his repertoire, including varied melodies and tunes of his youth, many of which date back more than 200 years to the earliest Appalachian settlers".
[7] Melvin Wine played his music for a variety of audiences at venues as diverse as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Wolf Trap Farm Park near the nation's capitol, Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania,[6] at festivals across West Virginia, as well as a weekly volunteer gig at a Braxton County nursing home, homecomings, and fund raisers in his region.
He taught for the master-apprentice program at the Augusta Heritage Center at Davis & Elkins College,[5] whose goal was to pass along the largely unwritten canon of pre-Colonial Appalachian music to the next generation.