Laura Wright 
In the mountains of Northeast Tennessee, music has always traveled easily.
A fiddle played on a porch could carry across a hollow. Dance tunes echoed from barns and cabins. Old melodies passed from one musician to another until no one quite remembered who had played them first.
But according to an old Johnson County legend, there is one fiddler whose music continued even after the musician himself was gone.
His name was Martin Stone.
And the strangest part of the story isn’t that his fiddle can supposedly still be heard.
It is what Stone was said to have played for while he was alive.
Rattlesnakes.
Martin Stone
The legend places Martin Stone in Johnson County, Tennessee, a mountainous county tucked into the northeastern corner of the state.
Stone was remembered as an exceptionally talented fiddler. People enjoyed hearing him play, but according to the story, his ability extended beyond entertaining his neighbors.
He could charm snakes.
Not harmless snakes.
Rattlesnakes.
The surviving version of the legend claims Stone discovered that a particular range or octave on his fiddle produced an extraordinary reaction in the reptiles. When he played it, rattlesnakes that would ordinarily become defensive seemed to grow strangely calm.
Whether there was ever a historical Martin Stone behind the legend is more difficult to establish.
But the story itself became sufficiently established in Tennessee folklore that folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham included Johnson County’s phantom fiddler among the supernatural traditions she collected from the state.
The Rattlesnake Den
As Stone became more confident in his unusual ability, the story says he began visiting a particular rattlesnake den.
There he would position himself on a rock near the entrance and begin to play.
The snakes emerged.
Yet they did not strike.
Instead, they seemed almost mesmerized by the music.
One can imagine how quickly something like this would have become a local spectacle. In an Appalachian community where fiddling was already woven deeply into social life, a musician capable of controlling rattlesnakes with his bow would hardly remain anonymous.
Stone supposedly became increasingly proficient at it.
He could stand beside the den surrounded by rattlesnakes and continue playing while the animals remained docile.
For a while, at least.
The Music Stops
Something eventually changed.
The old account doesn’t explain exactly what Stone did differently.
Perhaps he played the wrong note.
Perhaps he moved too suddenly.
Perhaps the snakes were never enchanted in the first place.
Whatever happened, Stone returned to the familiar place and began playing as he had before.
This time, the rattlesnakes did not become calm.
They attacked him.
Stone was later found dead.
Had the story ended there, it would have remained a grim mountain tale about a man who became too confident in his ability to control something dangerous.
But Martin Stone’s story supposedly continued.
The Fiddle Inside the Cave
After Stone’s death, people began telling of something peculiar around the place where he had played.
On summer evenings, visitors near the rock could supposedly hear fiddle music.
It did not come from a house.
There was no musician nearby.
The sound seemed to emerge from the cave itself.
The implication was obvious.
Martin Stone had returned to the rattlesnake den.
Only now there was no living fiddler sitting upon the rock.
The snakes had killed the musician.
They had not silenced his fiddle.
Music and the Supernatural
Stone’s story belongs to a much larger family of folklore connecting the fiddle with supernatural forces.
That association is surprisingly old and widespread.
Fiddlers encounter ghosts.
They play for supernatural dancers.
They challenge the Devil.
Sometimes the Devil himself takes up the instrument.
Traditional stories repeatedly treat the fiddle as something slightly different from other musical instruments, capable of inspiring uncontrollable dancing, enchanting listeners or crossing boundaries ordinary people should leave alone.
The tradition remains strong enough that modern folklorist and old-time fiddler Joe McHugh has collected and created stories inspired specifically by the supernatural mythology surrounding violins and fiddles.
Even outside Appalachia, legends tell of phantom fiddlers whose music continues after their disappearance or death.
Johnson County’s story fits comfortably into that tradition.
But it has a distinctly Appalachian addition.
The rattlesnake.
Can Music Charm a Snake?
The idea of charming snakes with music is ancient, but the reality is somewhat different.
Snakes do not respond to melodies in the way human listeners do. Their reactions are more closely connected to vibration and movement.
A traditional snake charmer’s animal is largely responding to the movement of the instrument and the person holding it rather than appreciating the tune.
That doesn’t make the Martin Stone story entirely meaningless.
A fiddle produces substantial vibration. Stone’s movements while playing would also have provided visual stimuli.
A person who repeatedly approached the same den and learned how the animals behaved might conceivably have developed techniques that appeared remarkable to observers.
But there is an enormous difference between understanding an animal’s behavior and actually controlling it.
If there was a real Stone, perhaps eventually he discovered that difference.
The Rattlesnakes of Appalachia
Rattlesnakes were no imaginary danger to people living in the Appalachian Mountains.
The timber rattlesnake is native to the region and historically occupied rocky slopes, ledges and denning areas throughout the mountains.
Encounters would have been familiar enough to earlier generations.
So would stories about them.
Snakes occupy a particularly complicated position in Appalachian tradition. They can represent danger, evil and death, but they also appear in folk medicine, religious traditions, weather beliefs and countless local stories.
A man who could seemingly control rattlesnakes would therefore possess something beyond an entertaining trick.
He would appear to have power over one of the mountains’ most feared creatures.
That is precisely the sort of person around whom folklore grows.
Was Martin Stone Real?
This is where the mystery becomes frustrating.
The legend is preserved as a Johnson County tradition, and the phantom fiddler appears in collections of Tennessee ghost lore.
But establishing the biography of Martin Stone is another matter.
The familiar story provides few details that can easily be tested against historical records. Dates are vague. The exact location of the cave is uncertain in readily available accounts. Even the circumstances surrounding Stone’s supposed death arrive primarily through folklore rather than contemporary documentation.
That does not prove Martin Stone never existed.
Nor does the survival of the story prove that he did.
Folklore often preserves the outline of a real person long after the details required to identify him have disappeared.
A gifted local fiddler becomes an extraordinary fiddler.
A man who knew how to approach snakes becomes a snake charmer.
An accidental death becomes the moment the snakes finally turned against him.
And an unexplained sound heard near a cave becomes his fiddle.
Perhaps that is what happened here.
What Was Heard at the Cave?
The most interesting part of the legend may be the simplest.
People supposedly heard music.
Mountain environments can produce strange acoustics. Sounds travel considerable distances through valleys and hollows, particularly under certain atmospheric conditions.
A fiddler playing somewhere far away might sound surprisingly close.
Water can produce rhythmic sounds.
Wind moving through narrow openings can create tones.
Even insects can create noises that become surprisingly musical when heard from a distance.
Any of these could help explain the legend.
But folklore rarely survives because someone heard an odd noise once.
Stories survive because people keep telling them.
And in Johnson County, whatever was heard became associated with Martin Stone.
The Fiddler Who Never Left
Perhaps there really was a Martin Stone.
Perhaps he was an unusually gifted musician who entertained his neighbors with dangerous demonstrations around rattlesnakes.
Perhaps the snakes eventually killed him.
Or perhaps those details accumulated around a forgotten fiddler whose real life disappeared generations ago.
The historical record may never give us enough information to know.
But somewhere along the way, Johnson County acquired a ghost.
On warm summer evenings, according to the old story, someone standing near the place where Stone once played might hear the faint sound of a fiddle drifting from inside the cave.
There is no musician to be found.
Only the rock.
The cave.
And whatever may still live inside it.
Perhaps it is simply the peculiar way sound travels through the mountains.
Perhaps an old tune is drifting in from another hollow.
Or perhaps Martin Stone discovered that death could stop the dance without necessarily stopping the music.
If the legend is true, the phantom fiddler still plays.
The safest course might be to enjoy the music from a distance.
After all, the snakes may still be listening too.
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