Texas Frontier Fiddle

After a hard day's work taming the Texas frontier, settlers would often relax with a little music. Fiddlers might pull out a violin like this one from the late 1700s or early 1800s and call folks to a square dance with the opening bars of "Cotton-Eyed Joe." Old-time fiddle music from the Texas frontier paved the way for today's western swing and bluegrass music which still features fiddlers "sawing" on the strings.