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strings 101 MUSiC & MUSiCiANS
TTTRY TO LISTEN TO RECORDINGS OF MARK O’CONNOR when he was ayoungster on the competition circuit without swaying or tapping anyparts of your body. Then check out some old mono recordings by suchfiddlers as Benny Thomasson and Eck Robertson—players that had aninfluence on O’Connor (Thomasson was his early fiddling mentor). Ifyou’ve never heard this kind of music before, you might be a little per-plexed. It’s clearly based on old-time fiddling styles, kind of jazzy, a littlelike bluegrass, but not quite any of those things.
You’ve just discovered Texas-style fiddling, a wonderfully free andeasy music despite its having been developed specifically to be played atcontests. Oh, sure, you can get into all the finger-twisting variations youwant, but even then, Texas fiddling never really sashays far from thedance floor.
Inspired initially by the Georgia fiddling-contest music of the 1910sand ’20s, the Texas style comes in all sorts of flavors: breakdowns, theshow-off variation form on traditional tunes; slow and lyrical waltzes;
polkas, either slowish and heavyin the Bohemian style or fast inthe Canadian manner; schottis-ches, the German take on Scottishmusic; rags, which cut loose a lit-tle more freely than the ScottJoplin–era piano ragtime thatinspired them; swing tunes, jazzstandards played in Texas-fiddlestyle; and much more.
The basics of the style includea swinging backbeat, lots of slides(but fewer than bluegrass), plentyof ornaments (not as quick as butsassier than Celtic), rich bass linesinspired by jazz, and smooth andliquid bowing.
You don’t have to be fromTexas to play Texas-style fiddling(although it does help you win
contests in the Lone Star State). But itdoesn’t hurt. Consider David Wallace.
Now he’s a full-fledged New Yorker who teaches at Juilliard, but he cameout of Texas from a family that traces its roots back to a signer of theTexas Declaration of Independence. Wallace grew up fluent in classical as
Lone Star State of MindDavid Wallace offers seven steps
to Texas-style fiddle
BY J A M E S R E E L
THE DOCTOR IS IN: David Wallace.
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Strings101.130 4/22/05 4:04 PM Page 25
well as fiddling styles, and now spends muchof his time extolling the virtues of Texas fid-dling in performances and workshops aroundthe country. With a DMA from Juilliard, some-times he can’t help billing himself as DocWallace. Whatever you call him, he’s the manto ask for advice if you want to improvise flu-ently in the Texas style.
This doctor is definitely in, melding Texasfiddle with jazzy New York attitude and energyon the CD The Doc Wallace Trio, Live at theLiving Room (available by emailing [email protected]). A transcription ofWallace’s breakdown version of “I’ll Fly Away”appears on pages 28–29.
S E V E N S T E P SLet’s assume you want to master the break-down, the foundation of Texas-style contestfiddling, consisting of a traditional tune and aset of variations. Wallace suggests seven steps.
First, learn the basic two-part tune of thebreakdown. “You need to have a sense of whatthe tune is before you learn the complicatedversions of it,” Wallace warns. “When I firstlearned this style, I was clueless that thesemeandering variations were coming from atune.”
Most Texas breakdowns, he explains, comefrom Irish or Scottish melodies, which are inmore-or-less binary form, two repeated parts
of about eight bars each. “One of those parts isusually called the ‘coarse’; it’s the part on thelower two strings,” says Wallace. “The other isthe ‘fine,’ which is on the upper two strings.You improvise on those two different parts ofthe tune.”
Wallace points out that most breakdownsconsist of seven or eight standard variations,each highlighting a specific technique—forexample, cross-rhythmic development of thetune, adding fourth-finger drones, or transpos-ing the melody to create second- and third-position variations on the tune.
Coincidentally, you’ll find seven or eightstandard-variation techniques for a breakdown,including one variation in second position onthe high or “fine” part of the tune, and athird-position variation for the low or “coarse”part.
The best way to start learning all this is bypairing a recording of the breakdown with anexact transcription of the improvisation.Wallace recommends Stacy Phillips’ bookMark O’Connor: The Championship Years (MelBay Publications), which you can read whilelistening to O’Connor’s CD of the same name(Country Music Foundation). Or pairO’Connor’s Soppin’ the Gravy (Rounder) withtranscriptions by Daniel Carwile that you candownload from O’Connor’s website (www.markoconnor.com). Peter Martin has an excel-lent series of transcriptions in print (PetimarPress, available at petimarpress.com), andWallace says Martin will usually make you atape of some source recordings if you ask.
Second, learn a classic rendition of thetune exactly as an established fiddler played it.If you’ve got some of the materials recom-mended in Step One, you’ve probably alreadystarted doing this. Better yet, try to learn thetune from the fiddler in person, and get yourquestions answered along the way.
“The thinking,” says Wallace, “is thatyou’ve got to know the tradition before youcan vary it. Once you’ve done that, the bestteachers of fiddlers will say, ‘OK, now go makeit better.’ Then you come back with your ownrendition of it, and they’ll let you know ifyou’re on track or going too far afield.”
That’s Step Three: studying lots of possiblevariations by other fiddlers, and combiningelements of the different versions during per-formance. “While you’re doing that,” saysWallace, “let your ear spontaneously inspireyou to substitute a phrase, part of a phrase, oreven a beat.”
Wallace stresses that you should study mul-tiple renditions of the same tune, so you don’twind up merely imitating a single fiddler’swork. Wallace might start by listening to a
S T R I N G S | June/July 200526
strings 101
Strings101.130 4/22/05 4:04 PM Page 26
June/July 2005 | S T R I N G S 27
recording by Benny Thomasson—who almostsingle-handedly started pioneering the Texasstyle in the 1920s and reached his peak in the’50s—then look into a more recent version byDale and Terry Morris (for a list of completerecordings, email [email protected]).
“Then I’d learn other licks from jam ses-sions and recordings, and eventually I’d puttogether my own version with my own ideas,but grounded in these others,” he explains.“It’s important to have a point of origin, butstill put your individual spin on it.”
Fourth, determine the underlying melodicskeleton of the variations, the most essentialnotes in the tune off which you can hang vari-
ations. “In ‘Blackberry Blossom,’ that wouldbe the descending scale of G, F!, E, and D,”says Wallace. “That’s the skeleton, and youcan embellish that with triplets, arpeggios, allsorts of things. Just find the fundamentalmelody behind the notes, and figure out howto play around it.”
So much for the melody. In the fifth step,it’s time to analyze the harmonies. Wallacesuggests playing the chord progression on gui-tar or mandolin, then auralizing the progres-sion as you play the tune. “That helps you feelwhere you are in the form,” says Wallace. “TheTexas-style progressions usually have a walk-ing bass, and it’s really driving to the cadence.It outlines the phrase structure so clearly, andthe more you have the harmony and therhythm in your consciousness, the better youknow where you are and the better you cankeep your variations in line with what’s goingon. You don’t want to play an extra bar inyour variation that doesn’t belong there.
“You have to stick more or less to the struc-ture or shape of the tune.”
Sixth, play the tune in a jam session, andsteal other fiddlers’ ideas by watching theirlicks and listening closely when it’s their turnto play. “The Texas style really comes from the
jam-session culture,” says Wallace. “In someways, that’s the best part of these fiddle con-tests, people sitting under a shade tree andpassing a tune back and forth. A number offiddlers don’t care about the contest; the jamsession is what it’s about. That’s where thetunes get stretched farther than they might ona contest stage. These jams can go on allnight.”
Finally, it’s time to arrange and composenew variations that are entirely your own.“That can be done as simply as combiningparts of different variations,” Wallace says.“Benny Thomasson would start with one vari-ation technique and then end with another.Sometimes he would play four bars of a varia-tion of the coarse and then finish with theending phrase of the fine.
“Sometimes, and this doesn’t happen awhole lot, fiddlers will quote other tunes. Inthe breakdown ‘Grey Eagle,’ people startedquoting ‘Lime Rock’ as one of the variations.Things like that just become assimilated in thetradition over time.”
Work on this long enough and hardenough, and maybe someday you’ll createsomething that will be absorbed into the Texasfiddling tradition. !!
You don’t have to be fromTexas to play Texas-stylefiddling (although it doeshelp you win contests in
the Lone Star State).
Strings101.130 4/22/05 4:04 PM Page 27
S T R I N G S | June/July 200528
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strings 101
I’ll Fly AwayTRADITIONAL, ARRANGED BY DAVID WALLACE
This is a transcription of David Wallace’s performance of the tune from thealbum The Doc Wallace Trio: Live at the Living Room. “This is actually an origi-nal breakdown in the Texas-contest style,” says Wallace, “which I think will
shed light on the variation techniques, since most people know this song. Thetheme is presented, and then followed by three typical Texas-style variations.”
—Elisa M. Welch
Strings101.130 4/22/05 4:04 PM Page 28
June/July 2005 | S T R I N G S 29
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Strings101.130 4/22/05 4:04 PM Page 29
