Word: fiddlers
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After Enrico Caruso died, one of his fiddler accompanists decided to bow it alone. But Manhattan critics had few good words for his well-mannered Beethoven and Bach, and his Los Angeles concert fee was not enough to pay the room rent. Says hawk-nosed Xavier Cugat: "I knew that the American people was polite to an artist but crazy for a personality, so I decided to become a personality...
...they don't want three more men to take care of the platters," puffed pillow-fat Petrillo, "they can well afford to hire three more musicians-an organist, a piano player and a fiddler...
...Bakersfield dance last week was something special: Bob Wills was celebrating his 30th anniversary as a cowboy fiddler. For the occasion, he played his 35th new tune, a fox trot called G.I. Wish ("G.I. . . . wish that I were free to roam, G.I. wish that I were home"). It had the same kind of whine, the same kind of maudlin lyrics that put his Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima and Smoke on the Water among the nation's top-selling folk records last year...
Swart, handsome Jim Rob ("Bob") Wills, 40, son of a Texas sharecropping fiddler, has fiddled since he was ten. At 17 he preached the gospel at rural revival meetings, then joined a gang of promising Texas badmen, two of whom were eventually sentenced to life terms. (One of his record best-sellers is The Convict and the Rose.) Wills and a group of pick-up musicians, calling themselves the "Lightcrust Doughboys," played on W. Lee (Pass the Biscuits, Pappy) O'Daniel's radio show. Wills set to music O'Daniel's Beautiful Texas and Your...
Phil, the Fiddler is a memorial to a successful crusade that Alger led against the padrone system, by which hundreds of little street musicians, brought to Manhattan from Italy, were kept as virtual slaves. The story deals with one boy who escaped and was adopted by a rich doctor...