Fiddle Music Quotes & Sayings

I've been hearing fiddle music since I was in the womb, I'm sure. — Natalie MacMaster

From time to time he would feel that acute surge go over him, like his blood was too hot all of a sudden, dying away into that warm unhappy feeling that fiddle music gave him. — William Faulkner

I play the fiddle ... I'm not much to listen to yet, but we got no mice in our house. — Annie Proulx

aloneness is a bad fiddle I play against my own / burning — Colleen J. McElroy

There's just a lot of people that hold on to what country means to them. I love fiddle, I love steel, but I don't think it should be a rule that it has to be used in every song. I think that's not what defines or makes country music. — Eric Church

He liked to think that Heaven was what each person wanted it to be. He could see no future in lying around on a fluffy white cloud and listening to somebody playing on a harp, a picture of Heaven he had seen numerous times in one form or another. Even if it was that way, his personal preference would have run more to the fiddle. — Elmer Kelton

There's some places where, I don't know if they're fiddle fans, or Natalie fans or if they just love Celtic music, but there's some places where there's just awesome crowds. — Natalie MacMaster

She chased the song like a hound fast upon a scent. She pursued it through a forest primeval: a dark land planted with musical staves and rests and grown thick with briars of annotation. On she went and on still until she caught sight of the song ahead of her, fleeting and sly. "I see it," she said aloud, though she didn't mean to. — A.S. Peterson

Finally Bill Mixter would lower his head, lay his bow upon the strings, and draw out the first notes of a tune, and the others would come in behind him. The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being. They would play some tunes they had learned on the radio, but their knowledge was far older than that and they played too the music that was native to the place, or that the people of the place were native to. Just the names of the tunes were a kind of music; they cal l back the music to my mind still, after so many years: "Sand Riffle," "Last Gold Dollar," "Billy in the Low Ground," "Gate to Go Through," and a lot of others. "A fiddle, now, is an atmospheric thing," said Burley Coulter. The music was another element filling the room and pouring out through the cracks. When at last they'd had their fill and had gone away, the shop felt empty, the silence larger than before. — Wendell Berry

From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and howls. Nevertheless the beautiful and familiar tune was impervious to poor performance, and Inman thought how painfully young it sounded, as if the pattern of its notes allowed no room to imagine a future clouded and tangled and diminished. — Charles Frazier

My interest in his new toy, the Theremin, isn't very big. It simply does not fit into my way of playing music. I do not want to fiddle around with my hands in the air. — Klaus Schulze

It was a haunting tune, unresigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind and say goodbye. — Kristin Cashore

I got to where I couldn't listen to country radio. Country music is supposed to have steel and fiddle. When I hear country music, it should be country. — Gretchen Wilson

Sometimes, the Angel [of Music] leans over the cradle ... and that is how there are little prodigies who play the fiddle at six better than men of fifty, which, you must admit is very wonderful. Sometimes, the Angel comes much later, because the children are naughty and won't learn their lessons or practice their scales. And sometimes, he does not come at all, because the children have a wicked heart or a bad conscience. — Gaston Leroux

We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency. — Mark Twain

I just started playing music on the street and walking around with a fiddle, and I think that's kind of when I started being serious - or as serious as it's going to get. — Frank Fairfield

She closed her eyes and began to weave a song. She abandoned the familiar melodies she'd played so many times before and went in search of something new, no longer wanting a song fed on pain or guilt. She needed one that could replace those wounds with strength, with resolve, with confidence. She needed a song that could not only assuage, but heal and build anew. The notes stumbled around the room, tripping over beds and empty stools and hollow men sleeping. They warbled and fell, haphazard, chaotic, settling without flight. Fin's forehead creased and she persisted. She let her fingers wander, reached out with her mind. She chased the fleeting song she'd glimpsed once before. In Madeira she'd felt a hint of it: something wild, untameable, a thing sprung whole and flawless from the instant of creation. — A.S. Peterson

I keep a fiddle hooked up in the music - we've got a music room - and try to pick it up. — Johnny Gimble

Lots of the bands [in New Orleans] couldn't read too much music. So they used a fiddle to play the lead - a fiddle player could read - and that was to give them some protection. — Danny Barker

As one old gentleman put it, 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. — Robert Fulghum

It is utterly unfair," she said, shooing Wrigley away and
tossing aside her blanket, "that your country boy smile isn't
illegal." She pulled her feet from beneath him, but then she swung a leg over him and straddled his lap, still smiling at him while she took his cheeks in her hands and pressed a soft, open-lipped kiss to his mouth.
Will's pulse kicked up the tempo. He gripped her hips and
pushed against her, parted his lips to make way for her tongue.
Music exploded inside him. Electric guitars, keyboard, fiddle,
bongos. No words, just the white-hot melody of their bodies.
The intoxicating scent of her shampoo tickled his nose, but the intrigued woman scent was stronger - heady and spicy and everything.
He wanted her. — Jamie Farrell

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"
"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods, ...
She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

Then she took up the bow and began to play. The tone was warm and deep, storied with layers of age. — A.S. Peterson

Let the violin become a fiddle, boy. — Gina Marinello-Sweeney

It was August 1988, I was an 80s person, contemporaneous with Duran Duran and The Cure, not that fiddle and accordion music grandad listened to in the days when he trudged up the hill in the dusk with a friend to court grandma and her sisters. I didn't belong here, with all of my heart I felt that. It didn't help that I knew the forest was actually an 80s forest and the mountains actually 80s mountains. So what was I doing here? My plan had been to write. But I couldn't, I was all on my own and lonely to the depths of my soul. — Karl Ove Knausgard

The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him
why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. — Mark Twain

This is why there are so few true musicians. A lot of folks can sing or saw out a tune on a fiddle. A music box can play a song flawlessly, again and again. But knowing the notes isn't enough. You have to know how to play them. Speed comes with time and practice, but timing you are born with. You have it or you don't. — Patrick Rothfuss

People everywhere, enjoying life, smiling, and just slowing down to let the world take care of itself for a few hours.
The feeling was contagious. Especially when I stepped into McPherson's Pub to grab a bite of the special and listen to some traditional Irish music. The fiddle made me want to dance with myself, and many did. The drum beat like my very own heart. And some little flute that looked no wider than a pencil reminded me of the Aran Islands floating not too far from Abbeyglen.
God was here tonight. In the strings of the guitar and the call of the singer's voice. I realize how often I overlook him back at home.
And I know I don't want to do that anymore.
The LORD will send His faithful love by day; His song will be with me in the night a prayer to the Gid of my life. — Jenny B. Jones

The Swedish folk music - I can't hear any connection between my music and fiddle tunes, but I guess since I grew up with that, kind of, Swedish tone or harmony. — Gustav Ejstes

Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one. — Duke Ellington

Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing. Her hair was as golden as the sun's rays, and her soul as clear and blue as her eyes. She wheedled her mother, was kind to her doll, took great care of her frock and her red shoes and her fiddle, but loved most of all, when she went to sleep, to hear the Angel of Music. — Gaston Leroux

Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition. — Wynton Marsalis

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. — Rory Block

I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians. — Vladimir Nabokov

If Nero had played a better fiddle, Rome might never have burned. — Marty Rubin

My grandfather played a mandolin, so I got my hands on that. Then on down to a banjo, and I found I couldn't play any kind of soft or mournful music with that so I took up the fiddle in my late 20s or early 30s - and that was far too late. But it keeps me off the streets. It has been a love of mine since I was 17 maybe. — Brendan Gleeson

I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable. — Wynton Marsalis

My son, Walker, has a band called The Dust Busters. You know, he plays banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, so a lot of my interest in that kind of music comes from him constantly listening to this stuff. He's taught me the history of it. It's remarkable how these young kids are now turned on to more traditional old-time music. — Sam Shepard

The light was grainy, dusty; it looked like the Milky Way had spread from the top of the sky all down the west, and the tented shapes of the mountains were huge and satin black against it, and the ridgeline trees made a filigree of onyx. The wind had increased but not cooled; the promise of full summer was in it. And when Dr. Barcroft turned from the west to look again at the house, he was hardly surprised to see that it had begun to turn like a wheel upon a vertical axle as the silhouettes of the dancers raced past window after window. It was as if their dancing, the female slide and shuffle, the masculine drum and thunder, propelled the house behind them; it had become a merry-go-round, turning steadily and stately as the music went just a little bit faster, just a little more, and he could tell there were furies in it, whirlwinds and cyclones and hurricanes that Quigley's fiddle barely held in check, that his calling could barely control. — Fred Chappell

Do I start with the lyrics? No. Quite honestly, it's the opposite. I generally get the melody first - I kinda fiddle around on the guitar and work out a melody. The lyrics are there to flesh out the tone of the music. I've tried before to do things the other way around, but it never seems to work. Obviously, I spend a lot of time on my lyrics, I take them very seriously, but they're kinda secondary. Well, equal, maybe. I think sometimes that if you write a poem, it should remain as just a poem, just ... words. — Iron & Wine

It throbbed and pulsed, channeled by elemental forces of fear, love, hope, and sadness. The bow stabbed and flitted across the strings in a violent whorl of creation; its hairs tore and split until it seemed the last strands would sever in a scrape of dissonance. Those who saw the last fragile remnants held their breath against the breaking. The music rippled across the ship like a spirit, like a thing alive and eldritch and pregnant with mystery. The song held. More than held, it deepened. It groaned. It resounded in the hollows of those who heard. Then it softened into tones long, slow, and patient and reminded men of the faintest stars trembling dimly in defiance of a ravening dark. At the last, when the golden hairs of the bow had given all the sound they knew, the music fled in a whisper. Fin was both emptied and filled, and the song sighed away on the wind. — A.S. Peterson

Bill Monroe spoke of bringing 'ancient tones' into his music with echoes of British and Irish fiddle and bagpipe music, while also delving deeply into American blues, gospel, folk hymnody, and hill country dance music. To that gumbo, he added the invigorating rhythms and harmonies of hot jazz. It was a new kind of American music, named in honor of his band The Blue Grass Boys to be known, simply, as bluegrass. — Paul Zollo

A waltz begins, that floating, sweet rhythm. The fiddle is plaintive. A few minutes ago she was at least pleasantly contented. Now certain of the notes dip into her like ladles and come up full of loneliness. The people in the room recede. They are strangers, every one. — Anna Keesey

And elsewhere in the woods, there is another party, one taking place inside a hollow hill, full of night-blooming flowers. There, a pale boy plays a fiddle with newly mended fingers while his sister dances with his best friend. There, a monster whirls about, branches waving in time with the music, There, a prince of the Folk takes up the mantle of king, embracing a changeling like a bother, and, with a human boy at his side, names a girl his champion. — Holly Black

You got to think a musical instrument is human or, anyway, alive ... You take a fiddle now, we say it has a neck, and in the human neck what do you find? Vocal cords like strings, where the sound comes from. — Annie Proulx

Living in Cape Breton, it's really all about fiddle music, so it's not like there were other instruments out there that tempted me and it was like I had to decide which one. It was automatically fiddle, because it's the predominant instrument in Cape Breton Island. — Natalie MacMaster