Dig Deeper
In the fifth step, it’s time to analyze the harmonies. Wallace suggests playing the chord progression on guitar or mandolin, then auralizing the progression as you play the tune. “That helps you feel where you are in the form,” says Wallace. “The Texas-style progressions usually have a walking bass, and it’s really driving to the cadence. It outlines the phrase structure so clearly, and the more you have the harmony and the rhythm in your consciousness, the better you know where you are and the better you can keep your variations in line with what’s going on. You don’t want to play an extra bar in your variation that doesn’t belong there.

“You have to stick more or less to the structure or shape of the tune.”

Sixth, play the tune in a jam session, and steal other fiddlers’ ideas by watching their licks and listening closely when it’s their turn to play. “The Texas style really comes from the jam-session culture,” says Wallace. “In some ways, that’s the best part of these fiddle contests, people sitting under a shade tree and passing a tune back and forth. A number of fiddlers don’t care about the contest; the jam session is what it’s about. That’s where the tunes get stretched farther than they might on a contest stage. These jams can go on all night.”

Finally, it’s time to arrange and compose new variations that are entirely your own. “That can be done as simply as combining parts of different variations,” Wallace says. “Benny Thomasson would start with one variation technique and then end with another. Sometimes he would play four bars of a variation of the coarse and then finish with the ending phrase of the fine.

“Sometimes, and this doesn’t happen a whole lot, fiddlers will quote other tunes. In the breakdown ‘Grey Eagle,’ people started quoting ‘Lime Rock’ as one of the variations. Things like that just become assimilated in the tradition over time.”

Work on this long enough and hard enough, and maybe someday you’ll create something that will be absorbed into the Texas fiddling tradition