Just in Tune William Sidney Mount These poems, stories, songs, quote, and art have been gathered from all over the world, partly via FIDDLE-L, an online list for fiddlers and those who love fiddle music. dhebert@crocker.com

Fiddle Music Everywhere, Even When There's No One There! by Gus Garelick I went to Weiser, Idaho, for the first time in 1972. The old hotel was still standing downtown, and if you were seeking a quiet place during the week of the National Old Time Fiddle Contest, this was not it. Fiddlers were jamming in the lobby all night long, and private jams were happening in some of the rooms as well. There was literally non-stop music in the town of Weiser all week long. I was fairly new to fiddling at the time, and I didn't get a whole lot of sleep that week. But towards the end of the week, when it was obvious I wasn't going to win anything in the contest, I just spent more time at the hotel, hanging out with every variety of fiddler I could find: Bluegrass fiddlers, Texas fiddlers, Canadian fiddlers, Ozark fiddlers... But one night, all the excitement and lack of sleep caught up to me. I collapsed in my room, and kept having strange dreams about old cowboys. The sound of fiddling never stopped. Maybe there were ghosts in the old hotel. I didn't know what it was, but I told my wife I thought we should hit the road. We were going to drive to Portland the next day, so I figured-- let's just get an early start. The road through Eastern Oregon is dark and lonely. There aren't very many towns out there. And I started getting tired from driving. I would pull over-- since there was practically nothing out there-- and try to get a little rest. But I swore I heard fiddlers in the distance. My wife heard it too. Like maybe someone was camped out and there was another jam session somewhere. We went looking for the campers, but there was just rocks and chaparral. And we were too tired to really look any further. So we tried to sleep. The fiddling kept going-- all night. We thought we were going crazy. We got back in the car and drove some more, but every time we'd stop, we thought we heard more fiddlers hiding behind the bushes. We stopped at an all night truck stop, and we thought there were fiddlers hanging out in the kitchen; we could almost make out what they were playing. Around dawn we got to the town of Baker. Years ago, Sam Bush wrote a fiddle tune about that town called "The Other Side of Baker"-- he had been a junior national champion at Weiser sometime in the mid-60s. Baker was just coming to life--- but we were half dead. We were really ready to crash-- and the sound of fiddles was finally starting to fade. I never could explain what happened. Our friends in Portland thought we were hallucinating. Which I guess was true. But they didn't think we were crazy. In fact, they said there were stories about pipers in the Scottish Highlands who inspired soldiers to go off to battle with the sounds of the pipes still ringing in their ears. Well, we weren't headed for any battles. But I can still imagine the sounds of those fiddles out in the high desert. We went back to Weiser the next year. The old hotel had burned down. We stayed with a family in town, right near the high school where the contest was held. No ghosts, no bad dreams, no hallucinations. The fiddling was all in my head. Gus Garelick is a fiddler and radio host of "The Fiddlin' Zone" at KCRB in Rohnert Park, CA