The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-03-14
NOUN AMBER
 FIDDLERS LICHTEN HEART OF GEORGIA
Echoes of Long Forgotten Times Resound at the
 State Convention.
(special to The Farmer.l )

Atlanta, Ga, March 1.-The Old Fsiddlers of Georgia, first assembled as aSclan a year ago, have recently clos ed their second engagement in this city. The pride of Georgia's heart is in her annual grand opera, and thousands of people congregate in the Auditorium every April to listen to strange music in a strange tongue, and many of them enjoy it almost as much as they think they do." But the 'to1d hddlers'' really touch the heart
 As a class these musicians represent the mountaineer type, long and linn Der of body, silent, slow Of speech, re- fined of feature, with quiet gray eyes. hair parted in the back. Their an cestors took the mountains, and the sons have never left the neighborhood. One family live in the same house built by their sire more than a cen tury ago. A great majority of the men are poor. Their fare is simple their life is bare and hard, and almost the only diversion is from the music of the fiddle or meIodion-that is, if the family be rich enough to invest <in a meIodion. The fiddle is often home made.
 When the mountaineer visits or re- . cefves vicitors the fiddle is used as the entertainer, and when the men jour ney to the county courthouse the in- strument is carried along to make mu- sic and join in with other fddlers lcongregated there, and in the hands of these men, who know no such thing as notes or tempo, the fiddle is made to singsfor all she's worth.
 Inactivity and isolation have not made ambitious men of the mountain eers, and on long sunny days when it's too hot to work in the fields the fiddle is picked up by ttpa", for the average nountaineer does not seem to in the forties- Some of the fdd1es there are no violins in the conven- tion-are older than the tunes they play, having been in the family gen. erations, and in one instance the in strument has been handed down to seven sires.. The men look with scorn upon modern popular music, ragtime and opera, and nothing interests them except tunes that have been sung or played among them out of memory.
 When the winter is a particularly hard one and everything goes wrong on the little strip of land to make both ends meet, the head of the family finds a use for his corn-almost the only crop he can depend upon-and turns his cabin into disti11ery, some times running his pipe into the kitch- en chimney to put the revenue officers off the track of smoke. The distiller and laWbreaker is found sooner or la ter, and, with others, p1odding slow and weary, he is brought before the federal judge, who gives a word of kindly counsel and a light sentence.
 The fifty men assembled are not all noonshiners, however, a small per centage coming from wire grass re- gions, but all are from the heart of the woods, on peak or in dale, far from the roll of locomotive or honk of automobile. All the musicians are Americans. They do not represent the Georgia Cracker from the fact that for centuries they have not min gled in. the lowlands. If any enthu- siasm on the subject could be raised which is not probab1e-tE1e fddlers could trace their origin straight back hundreds of years to their mother country.