My dad was a telegraph operator for the Cotton Belt Railroad. He worked seven nights a week from 4 until midnight, no vacation.
When the doctors showed me an X-ray of my brain, they pointed to a black hole on the upper left side and told me that all memory from that spot was dead. I thought to myself that I hoped that's where I kept 'The Orange Blossom Special.'
I didn't really get crazy about Bob Wills until 1940.
To join Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys was like throwing a baseball around in your front yard and somebody coming over and signing you to play for the New York Yankees.
Texas was home. We went to Anchorage to get rich in 1959. Someone told us, 'If you drive a nail, you could make $100 a day in construction work.' We were hungry, and we stayed there for a year and a half. But I never did plan to stay there - the same with Nashville. I was gonna go up there and work, but Texas was home.
I go stay a week in these little towns that don't have an art outlet and... go to the schools and play some of the old Texas music, sort of 'go through the Texas country roots' is what they call it.
When I'd hear something that sounded like I could follow it - most of those big band jazz tunes are blues anyway - I would hum it and play with the fiddle while I was humming.
I keep a fiddle hooked up in the music - we've got a music room - and try to pick it up.
The magic, that's what keeps you playing. That's what never wears off.
When I was 15, I was working for a radio band in Shreveport. Cliff Bruner, the hottest Texas fiddler of them all, was on the same package shows, playing for Jimmie Davis.
I had a stroke in December of '99, and it affected my left side - my fingering side.
I tell my audiences today that I served 10 years in Nashville! That's a joke, of course; I was grateful for the work. Bob Ferguson, who produced Connie Smith, Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, started calling me in.
I've always liked the stuff that kicks.
When I get asked for advice for a young person starting in the music business, I tell them, 'Play every chance you get, and be real lucky.'
I was never very good at picking cotton, and then I only made fifty cents or $1 a day. People would work for $1 a day during the Depression. So we would get $2 for playing music and just having fun. I think that as a result of that it was not just the money, but we enjoyed doing it.
I grew up listening to the Light Crust Doughboys on WBAP.
I still play the fiddle every day. I'm afraid if I don't, it won't know who I am.
I asked the man on the phone from the National Endowment for the Arts what this fellowship entailed, and he said, 'Well, first there's $10,000.' I asked him, 'Can I pay it in installments?'
I wasn't really an old-time breakdown fiddler.
It's just a real thrill when you're showing somebody a chord progression or something, and you see that light come on, you know. You see 'em 'get it.'
