Be Who You Are Now
I didn’t even know I was doing it until I wasn’t doing it anymore. A simple shift in perspective that came about because of a fiddle lesson I took with David Ellis. My fiddle playing was a hot mess. I always felt like I needed to apologize for being a poor fiddle player because in my mind a good fiddle player played a lot of notes really fast. The fact that I couldn’t do that without scaring cats and young children didn’t stop me from going at it like I could. When David listened to me play he said, “That was interesting.” I guess he forgot that I was a teacher because in teacher language that means, man have we got some undoing to do. His first stab at undoing my mistaken belief about what made a good fiddle player was to tell me a story about Alison Krauss. In one ear and out the other. Then he tried a story about a bass player I know and respect. Didn’t care. In my mind a good fiddler played a lot of notes really fast and that’s what I wa...