TBT: A Young Man and His Fiddle

Yet another acquiescence to the Throw Back Thursday trend (I’m sooo trendy, after all). Here’s an old pic of me hanging out in my bedroom at mom & dad’s in 1973, practicing my fiddle. I was all of 19 at the time, and as you might guess from my attire and follicular exuberance, well on my way to full-blown hippiedom. I was using an old Kodak film-twister that had a timer on it… apparently I was making selfies 30 years before it became “the thing to do”. Yeah, trendy as hell, I am.

She was a grand old fiddle, actually, much better than my self-taught playing deserved — an elderly German Schweitzer I picked up at Rocky’s Music Center for a song I sung myself. I played the fiddle for several years, got kinda not bad on it, and could pull off a pretty respectable “Old Blackwater”, “Orange Blossom Special”, some early Charlie Daniels and several fiddle jigs.

I fancied myself following in the footsteps of John Hartford, playing guitar, banjo and fiddle, plus my old mandola (the subject of another post someday), and kept upping the ante to the point where at one time I was traveling to gigs with 7 or 8 different instruments. Some I played well, others were more of a gimmick to enhance my score as a “multi-instrumentalist”. I figured the more the better, right? I was young and foolish, obviously.

By the time I had reached 30 or so, however, I was getting all heated up by this incendiary guitar music called Flamenco, and decided to concentrate my practice almost exclusively on guitar, with a little banjo on the side for fun, and so I let the fiddle slide.

I guess I figured there were only so many hours in the day, and I’d probably never get as good on the fiddle as I wanted unless I upped my game by several hours… which for me, with all the time I was devoting to guitar and the ‘jo,  meant shooting for 8 hours or so of daily practice.

That would leave precious little time for women and certain other recreational diversions. That seemed extreme to me, considering the paydays I was having at the time. I’m a Capricorn, and we tend to be practical folk. It’s important to have a little balance in your life.

As for the fate of the Schweitzer, I eventually succumbed to the plight of most underpaid musicians. I had my eye on some instrument, amp or other piece of gear (don’t ask what, I have no clue), and sold my old fiddle, the case by then dusty from languishing unopened for years, to help generate the funds I needed.

I regret that decision as I regret all similar decisions over the years, each one foisted upon me by the state of my personal economics. But surrender being part of life (certainly so for a musician), I lose no sleep over it. With a little luck, the old Schweitzer is still making music in the hands of a better fiddler than I would ever have been.

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