File: smithreuben-oh-gettingstarted_M.mp3
Speakers:
RS – Reuben Smith
RS: My father used to take the fiddle out in the evening after supper and there usually wasn't too much back then to do, only the music and that. And he'd play and I used to watch him, and I decided that I wanted to play. I kinda took a strange way about it. One day when my father and mother went to town; I decided it was a good time to try the fiddle. So I took it out and I thought I should try to tuning it. So right off the bat I broke a string. That didn't go very good. When he come home that evening he went to play the fiddle and there was a broken string on it,. So he said he asked me, "Did you have this fiddle out today?" and I said "Yes." And he said, "What were you learning to play?" I said, "I thought I'd try to tune it first." "Yeah," he said, "that's a very good way to start." So he said, "Here put a string on." And he said, "Here, put it in tune." I had quite a battle with it, but he wound up putting it in tune for me. So I started from there. The first tune I tried playing was "Cock of the North". And it took me a while to master that, but then after a while they started coming little by little.