OZARKS MUSIC

Led to New Career

When he was about 28, Jerry Rosa decided he wanted to learn to play bluegrass fiddle. Let's rephrase that, he became obsessed with learning to play bluegrass fiddle.

"I wanted to play the fiddle. I really wanted to play the fiddle. I'd pick it up every night after I got home from work and practice for three to five hours. After about six months I said, `I'm not a fiddle player."

Rosa bought a mandolin for about $50.  "Almost overnight I could play the thing. I wasn't playing it like a real fine mandolin player, but I was playing," Rosa says.

After his uncle, Don Brown, known as the Father of Bluegrass Music in Missouri and an exceptional mandolin player, told Jerry he needed to work on technique to play louder, Rosa spent a year of obsessed practicing. As a self taught picker, his style may not always be technically correct, but he learned to play any song in any key.

"Or as I tell everybody, I can screw up any song in any key," Rosa says. 

That obsession with learning to play an instrument led to new obsessions, which eventually led to Rosa String Works.

It didn't take long for the budding mandolin picker to figure out he needed a better mandolin. After a trip to Nashville to look at a high-quality Lloyd Loar mandolin that cost $12,500, Rosa decided he would build his own to save money.

Rosa, who started working for Southwestern Bell in downtown St. Louis right out of high school in 1973, used his time in a van pool with other workers to read a book on mandolin building.

"I read it cover to cover eight times. I read it until I knew every word in that book," Rosa says. "It took me just about 30 calendar days to build my first one," Rosa says. "I was pretty tickled. I thought it was a pretty good mandolin."

Others did, too, for they began asking him to build instruments.

Rosa has built about 30 instruments: three guitars, two fiddles and the rest mandolins. He built a 1-string mandolin for Carmine D'Amico, who recorded the soundtrack for The Godfather.

"I ended up being a designer for most of their huge systems," he says. That computer background helps him in his new career as a sound engineer and producer.

"The recording studio has really taken off. It's computer-based, so that's a perfect match. I understand music. I understand computers," says Rosa.

His first recording was for his own group about three years ago. Since then he's recorded Rowden Review and Midnight Flight.  "I've done about 20 projects here," he says.

Starting with a $50 mandolin, Rosa has built a business and a following, thanks to his obsession.

"When I get obsessed with something, I don't get sort-of obsessed, I get totally obsessed," Rosa says.