Fiddle Quotes - Page 3

• All my momma's people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.

  Dolly Parton

  Piano, People, Grandpa

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• The trick to playing second fiddle is to play it like second Stradivarius.

  Robert Breault

  Play, Effort, Tricks

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• 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

  Player, New Orleans, Giving

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• [The current governing judicial philosophy is:] If you want something passionately enough, it is guaranteed by the Constitution. No need to fiddle around gathering votes from recalcitrant citizens.

  Robert Bork

  Philosophy, Want Something, Gathering

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• I use both instruments with their strengths in mind. Mandolin - no sustain and attack of the right hand, for rhythm. Fiddle - use sustain of the bow and the ability to slide the non-fretted notes, like singing.

  Sam Bush

  Hands, Mind, Singing

  Source: www.mandolincafe.com

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• There are things about how a note sounds on a violin that are really analogous to the human voice - you have a frequency and the air, and then you have a timbre which really is overtones - and making those things work together is one thing. The other thing is mechanical: If you can use your hands and arms to create sound on a fiddle, then learning to sing with it is like adding a third body part. And it's all training.

  Bruce Molsky

  Air, Hands, Voice

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• 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

  Reflection, Hands, Bored

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• I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It's a bit obsessive. That's why I can't do it all the time.

  David Hockney

  Night, Design, Opera

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• When you're a big money earner and your husband isn't, it makes you question how feminine you are. I felt I was less feminine than if I was a supporting wife, or a second fiddle, or 'Mrs. Higgins.

  Barbara Corcoran

  Husband, Wife, Feminine

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• A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.

  Virginia Woolf

  Art, Knowing, Play

  Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928”, Chatto & Windus

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• If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.

  Phyllis Bottome

  Integrity, Character, Play

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• I want to be a tuneswept fiddle string that feels the master melody, and snaps.

  Amedeo Modigliani

  Want, Masters, Strings

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• When I play on my fiddle in Dooney
  Folk dance like a wave on the sea.

  William Butler Yeats

  Dance, Sea, Play

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.71, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Music, Country, Boys

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• May your love be firm, and may your dream of life together be a river between two shores - by day bathed in sunlight, and by night illuminated from within. May the heron carry news of you to the heavens, and the salmon bring the sea's blue grace. May your twin thoughts spiral upward like leafy vines, like fiddle strings in the wind, and be as noble as the Douglas fir. May you never find yourselves back to back without love pulling you around into each other's arms.

  James Bertolino

  Dream, Night, Love Is

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• The expertise displayed by each musician is jaw-dropping and it's matched by their sensitivity and taste... Lizzy Hoyt displays equal mastery of the fiddle, harp and guitar, complemented by an otherworldly voice. To top it off, she comes across as a truly natural and relaxed, people loving performer.

  Jim Sinclair

  Guitar, Voice, People

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• The Bible is like a bull fiddle, you can play almost any tune you want on it.

  Tommy Douglas

  Play, Tunes, Bulls

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• This is a fantasy fiddle tune. The part you fantasize is the fiddle.

  Guy Clark

  Tunes, Fantasy, Performing

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• 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.

  Edgar Lee Masters

  Heart, People, Earth

  Edgar Lee Masters (2012). “Spoon River Anthology”, p.62, The Floating Press

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• How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?

  Katherine Mansfield

  Civilization, Breastfeeding, Body

  Katherine Mansfield (2016). “KATHERINE MANSFIELD Premium Collection: 160+ Short Stories & Poems (Literature Classics Series): The Complete Short Stories and Poetry of Katherine Mansfield: Bliss, The Garden Party, The Dove’s Nest, Something Childish, In a German Pension, The Aloe, Poems at the Villa Pauline, Child Verses...”, p.6, e-artnow

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• 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

  Mother, Sleep, Eye

  Gaston Leroux (2016). “The Phantom of the Opera & The Mystery of the Yellow Room (Mystery Classics): The Ultimate Gothic Romance Mystery and One of the First Locked-Room Crime Mysteries”, p.42, e-artnow

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• Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war. This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides, there isn't going to be any war. . . . If either of you boys says 'war' just once again, I'll go in the house and slam the door.

  Vivien Leigh

  Fun, Spring, War

  "Fictional character: Scarlett". "Gone with the Wind", www.imdb.com. 1939.

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Guitar

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• 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

  Music, Running, Lying

  Elmer Kelton (2016). “The Good Old Boys and The Smiling Country: Two Classic Westerns”, p.169, Forge Books

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• 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

  Inspiring, Country, Vocabulary

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