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I'll string a fiddle with your guts and make you play it while I dance.
Sep 25, 2025
It was the heart of any scam or fiddle -- keep the punter uncertain, or, if he is certain, make him certain of the wrong thing.
I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable.
Flying was as necessary to my business as fiddles and footlights.
When you're a big money earner and your husband isn't, it makes you question how feminine you are. I felt I was less feminine than if I was a supporting wife, or a second fiddle, or 'Mrs. Higgins.
I'm playing second fiddle to Justin Bieber - Bieber Fever is sweeping our house, and my girls have made it clear I'm no longer their favourite man.
We all know of course, that we should never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever fiddle around in any way with electrical equipment. NEVER.
I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.
Perhaps you see, therefore, why I think taste must come before nutrition? Our infatuation for the quasi-scientific has left us easy marks for con men and tin fiddle manufacturers.
Oh, I'm being eaten By a boa constrictor, A boa constrictor, A boa constrictor, I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor, And I don't like it--one bit. Well, what do you know? It's nibblin' my toe. Oh, gee, It's up to my knee. Oh my, It's up to my thigh. Oh, fiddle, It's up to my middle. Oh, heck, It's up to my neck. Oh, dread, It's upmmmmmmmmmmffffffffff . . .
I think the issue of female friendship really resonates well with women, ... So many women have a friend like Darcy or can relate to the feeling of being second-fiddle to a friend.
Others import yet nobler arts from France, Teach kings to fiddle, and make senates dance.
O, Love's but a dance, Where Time plays the fiddle! See the couples advance - O, Love's but a dance! A whisper, a glance, "Shall we twirl down the middle?" O, Love's but a dance, Where Time plays the fiddle!
And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.
You fiddle lucker!' she cried.
Sometimes, the Angel [of Music] leans over the cradle... and that is how there are little prodigies who play the fiddle at six better than men of fifty, which, you must admit is very wonderful. Sometimes, the Angel comes much later, because the children are naughty and won't learn their lessons or practice their scales. And sometimes, he does not come at all, because the children have a wicked heart or a bad conscience.
So we in Congress have a very clear choice. We can take largely symbolic action and sit back and fiddle while Americans burn more gasoline. Or we can pass concrete, effective legislation that will save consumers money while significantly reducing U.S. oil consumption.
A lot of the so-called systems composers have this thing that the system is always right. You don't fiddle with it at all. Well, I don't think that. I think the system is as right as you judge it to be. If for some reason you don't like a bit of it you must trust your intuition on that. I don't take a doctrinaire approach to systems.
Such is modern computing: everything simple is made too complicated because it's easy to fiddle with; everything complicated stays complicated because it's hard to fix.
[The current governing judicial philosophy is:] If you want something passionately enough, it is guaranteed by the Constitution. No need to fiddle around gathering votes from recalcitrant citizens.
A Fiddle for Angus is a charming tale. This is a very fine book.
It's not that I literally think I'm a fearie. It's just that I feel so different from most people. And this idea of a race living underground in caverns, spending all their days dancing and playing the fiddle and eating flowers and reciting poetry and sharing their dreams, that to me sounds much more real than the way people live in this world, hating and fighting and wanting and hurting.
Living in Cape Breton, it's really all about fiddle music, so it's not like there were other instruments out there that tempted me and it was like I had to decide which one. It was automatically fiddle, because it's the predominant instrument in Cape Breton Island.
I got me a fine wife and I got me old fiddle, when the suns coming up I got cakes on the griddle. And life ain't nothing, but a funny, funny riddle.
The Bible is like a bull fiddle, you can play almost any tune you want on it.
I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay
I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians.
Fiddle-dee-dee. War, war, war. This war talk's spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides, there isn't going to be any war. . . . If either of you boys says 'war' just once again, I'll go in the house and slam the door.
As one old gentleman put it, " Son, I don't care if you're stark nekkid and wear a bone in your nose. If you kin fiddle, you're all right with me. It's the music we make that counts.
If intelligence were a television set, it would be an early black-and-white model with poor reception, so that much of the picture was gray and the figures on the screen were snowy and indistinct. You could fiddle with the knobs all you wanted, but unless you were careful, what you would see often depended more on what you expected or hoped to see than on what was really there.
It's a beautiful lucid dream that has language that I can fiddle with.
I see the beauty of Mike's attempt to devise an ideal ethic and applaud his recognition that such must start by junking the present sexual code and starting fresh. Most philosophers haven't the courage for this; they swallow the basics of the present code--monogamy, family pattern, continence, body taboos, conventional restrictions on intercourse, and so forth--then fiddle with details...even such piffle as discussing whether the female breast is an obscene sight! (p.365)
My grandfather played a mandolin, so I got my hands on that. Then on down to a banjo, and I found I couldn't play any kind of soft or mournful music with that so I took up the fiddle in my late 20s or early 30s - and that was far too late. But it keeps me off the streets. It has been a love of mine since I was 17 maybe.
I prefer to make common cause with those whose weapons are guitars, banjos, fiddles and words.
A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But here, in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn't easy. You may ask 'Why do we stay up there if it's so dangerous?' Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word: tradition!
I'm a guitarist by background. That's what I used to do for sessions when I was younger and that sort of thing. We have several pianos in the house and I tend to just sit and fiddle around.
My dad plays the fiddle. He stopped playing for years. He was playing when I was a baby, and then he stopped for about five years, or ten years, he says. Then all of a sudden he started playing again, and we all got interested. We started having people like Ciarán Tourish coming up to the house, and Dinny McLaughlin, who taught Ciarán, and who taught myself as well. And it just grew from that
When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?" "They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now." But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods,… She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
It was a hurting tune, resigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind to say goodbye.
Those who refuse to play second fiddle may wind up playing no fiddle at all.
There are some people who do great stuff singing and playing fiddle at the same time and doing that kind of arrangement. But I think [I don't do that] partially because I'm still a loner on the guitar and banjo.
If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original. ... I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. ... I don't need time, I need a deadline. ...There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind. ... Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.
I cannot fiddle, but I can make a great state from a little city.
And I know I’m about to play second fiddle to another woman, as I should. But my love for you will never change, Maxon.
Bill Monroe spoke of bringing 'ancient tones' into his music with echoes of British and Irish fiddle and bagpipe music, while also delving deeply into American blues, gospel, folk hymnody, and hill country dance music. To that gumbo, he added the invigorating rhythms and harmonies of hot jazz. It was a new kind of American music, named in honor of his band The Blue Grass Boys to be known, simply, as bluegrass.
I've known Shawn for several years. And he's just an amazing talent. He's a great writer, a marvelous, marvelous guitar player, and plays really good fiddle.
The Frenchman, easy, debonair, and brisk, Give him his lass, his fiddle, and his frisk, Is always happy, reign whoever may, And laughs the sense of mis'ry far away.
You know one scene I always think about is in 'The Godfather', when Marlon Brando's in the hospital. Al Pacino arrives there and enlists the help of the baker to protect his father. The two of them stand outside and the baker fiddles with a cigarette lighter, but Pacino's hands are rock steady. That's when we sort of realize that he can do this.
I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.
By the way, when I say cut taxes, I don't mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing.