Shoji Tabuchi

Shoji Tabuchi Biography.

   Though he has never been heard on the radio or produced a recording that was widely sold beyond his own appearances, Japanese-born fiddler Shoji Tabuchi ranks by some measures as among the most popular musicians in the United States. He employs over 200 people at his theater in Branson, Missouri, where he performs two shows a day for much of the year, often selling out all 2,000 seats. Tabuchi's show in Branson regales busloads of visitors with elaborate dance routines, a range of musical genres, and plenty of Vegas-style glitz, but his path to wealth and fame started with pure enthusiasm for American country music.

   Tabuchi has never been willing to discuss his age, but he was a sophomore in college when he heard a concert in Osaka, Japan, by Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys in the mid-1960s, and he is thought to have been born in Daishoji, in Japan's Ishikawa Prefecture, around 1944. His father was a business executive, and Tabuchi majored in economics at St. Andrew's College, planning to move on to a management career. As a child, he had studied classical violin in Japan, often annoying teachers with his habit of improvising variations on the pieces he was assigned to learn. Hearing Acuff's fiddler Howdy Forrester play the nineteenth-century showpiece "Listen to the Mockingbird" quickly brought about a change in Tabuchi's musical direction. "I got sidetracked," he told Tom Uhlenbrock of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "I heard country music and bluegrass music and fell in love." The love affair was sealed when Acuff, as country stars often do, told him to stop by if he ever came to Nashville.Shoji Tabuchi

 Shoji Tabuchi

 Shoji Tabuchi

 Shoji Tabuchi

 Shoji Tabuchi

 Shoji Tabuchi

 Shoji Tabuchi

 Shoji Tabuchi

 

Shoji Tabuchi

The Shoji Tabuchi Show

Shoji Tabuchi

Shoji Tabuchi in Branson