The violin sings, but the fiddle dances.
I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument, and an unsuspected yearning to learn to play on it, that are bound to wake up and demand attention some day. Therefore, you who rail at such as disturb your slumbers with unsuccessful and demoralizing attempts to subjugate a fiddle, beware! for sooner or later your own time will come.
The most beautiful music of all is the music of what happens.
One man loves his fiddle (or, alas! his neighbours sometimes) for all the melodies he can wake from it - it is but a selfish love! Another, who is no fiddler, may love a fiddle too; for its symmetry, its neatness, its colour - its delicate grainings, the lovely lines and curves of its back and front - for its own sake, so to speak. He may have a whole galleryful of fiddles to love in this innocent way - a harem! - and yet not know a single note of music, or ever care to hear one. He will dust them and stroke them, and take them down and try to put them in tune - pizzicato ! - and put them back again, and call them ever such sweet little pet names .. and breathe his little troubles into them, and they will give back inaudible little murmurs in sympathetic response, like a damp Aeolian harp; but he will never draw a bow across the strings, nor wake a single cord - or discord ! Any who shall say he is not wise in his generation ? It is but an old-fashioned philistine notion that fiddles were only made to be played upon - the fiddles themselves are beginning to resent it; and rightly, I wot !
... genius itself succeeds only by arduous self-training ... to play on the fiddle it is not merely necessary to take a bow and fiddle with it.
Friends are like fiddle strings, they must not be screwed too tight.
FIDDLE, n. An instrument to tickle human ears by friction of a horse's tail on the entrails of a cat.
We consider that the man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia reels without losing his grip, may be depended upon in any kind of emergency.
Son, I don't care if you're stark nekkid and wear a bone in your nose. If you kin fiddle, you're all right with me. It's the music we make that counts.
While fiddling ... don't Bb or B#, just Bnatural.
If a feller can't bow, he'll never make a fiddler. He might make a violin player, but he'll never make no fiddler.
There is nothing, I think, in which the power of art is shown so much as in playing on the fiddle. In all other things we can do something at first. Any man will forge a bar of iron, if you give him a hammer; not so well as a smith, but tolerably. A man will saw a piece of wood, and make a box, though a clumsy one; but give him a fiddle and a fiddle-stick, and he can do nothing.
Then she took up the bow and began to play. The tone was warm and deep, storied with layers of age.
And then she caught the song. She fell upon it and music poured from the fiddle’s hollow, bright and liquid like fire out of the heart of the earth.
In a fiddlers house, all are dancers.
People clap after a violin song while people clap during a fiddle song.
I must shut my ears. The man of sin rubbeth the hair of the horse to the bowels of the cat.
What a host of light-hearted associations are revived by that living fountain of fun and frolic, an Irish fiddler! Every thing connected with him is agreeable, pleasant, jolly. All his anec-dotes, songs, jokes, stories, and secrets, bring us back from the pressure and cares of life, to those happy days and nights when the heart was as light as the heel, and both beat time-to the exhilarating sound of his fiddle.
Don't harass the fiddler, they may resort to violins.
The rude beginnings of every art acquire a greater celebrity than the art in perfection; he who first played the fiddle was looked upon as a demigod.
My uncle Buddy MacMaster is one of the greatest fiddlers Cape Breton has ever produced, and we've produced a lot of them! His fellow fiddlers owe him a huge debt, for he has greatly influenced and inspired all of us. He makes you want to dance; he can bring tears to your eyes.
I still play the fiddle every day. I’m afraid if I don’t, it won’t know who I am.
If you want to get smooth...it's ok to be aware of how you hold the bow and all that...tennis balls, door jams etc. but that stuff is really secondary...smoothness is in the mind as is all fiddling...it's all timing...get a metronome...learn to play on top of the beat (cause you probably already are pretty good at playing ahead of the beat) and then when you get comfortable with that learn to play behind the beat, which you can do with a metronome, cause it won't slow down with you, it will hold you up like a good rhythm section should do. It's like Ping Pong...if you concentrate on the ball and nothing else, your body will do the right things...Think and play the fiddle with your mind and you will find that your body will figure out the rest and in a way that is right for you. As your timing gets better your tone will automatically improve with it. Play into a cassette tape recorder to check yourself. You'll know your on the right track cause you will find yourself getting higher than any set of smokes or corn swaller of moonshine will ever take you.
The earth keeps some vibration going there in your heart, and that is you. And if the people find you can fiddle, why fiddle you must, for all your life.
I found it really hard for a couple of years to do any writing because all I wanted to do was play the fiddle. From the minute I took it up, I just couldn’t put it down.
When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story.
When I was very young my mother sang to me at bedtime and my dad would often play the banjo or fiddle in the evening. I knew music was important and central to everything, most particularly it had a powerful healing value and created a sense of peace and security. This stood out to me as I always felt the world was precarious and dangerous, and music supplied those moments of real peace and safety.
A good and true woman is said to resemble a Cremona fiddle: age but increases its worth and sweetens its tone.
I have quit chewing tobacco and don't touch any lager beer, and I don't speak to the girls at all. I am getting to be a perfect hermit; my fiddle, my dog, and my gun I almost worship.
The music comes from the fiddler’s heart, through his strings and straight into your heart.
The fiddle is the perfect folk instrument. It can be constructed entirely from natural materials and is a thing of beauty. It's light weight and easily transportable. It's loud enough for dancing and it's infinitely expressive. The only problem with it is that it's practically impossible to play.
Yeah, I was a pretty good kid, you know, I was—I was—I was an overachiever and I worked very hard, played a hell of a fiddle.
O Willie come sell your fiddle/ come sell your fiddle so fine
O Willie come sell your fiddle/ and buy a pint o'wine
If I should sell my fiddle/ the worl' would think I was mad;
for many a rantin' day/ my fiddle and I hae had
I prefer to make common cause with those whose weapons are guitars, banjos, fiddles and words.
They that dance must pay the fiddler.
A man must pay the fiddler, in my case it so happened that a whole symphony orchestra often had to be subsidized.
I play the fiddle....I'm not much to listen to yet, but we got no mice in our house.
Others import yet nobler arts from France, Teach kings to fiddle, and make senates dance.
He is a rarity which I cannot but be fond of, as one would be of a hog that could fiddle, or a singing owl.
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy.
What grows in the wood, and sounds in the town, and earns its master many a pound? A fiddle.
When I was young and had no sense I bought a fiddle for eighteen pence. And all the tunes that I could play was, "Over the Hills and Far Away.
There was no such thing as production at Starday. We'd go in with the band, we'd go over the song, I'd look over and tell the steel player to take a break or kick it off, and I'd get the fiddle to play a turnaround in the middle.
He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face towards the flames.
I never started to plow in my life; that some one did not stop in the road; and take me away to a dance or picnic. I ended up with forty acres; I ended up with a broken fiddle — and a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, and not a single regret.
If readin music starts botherin your fidddlin originality, then you got no business foolin round with that.
Giddy-up thar Kate, we can make more money plowin than we can playin tha fiddle.
For the good are always the merry
Save by an evil chance
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance.
A painter paints pictures on canvas but musicians paint their pictures on silence.