Country music does not usually catch my attention, but this piece did.
"When I was 15," he recalled in a recent phone interview, "I was working for a radio band in Shreveport. Cliff Bruner, the hottest Texas fiddler of them all, was on the same package shows, playing for Jimmie Davis. I asked him, 'Cliff, how do you play that hocum?,' which is what we still called swing there. And he said: 'Can you hum what you're thinking? Practice till you can play what you can hum.'
"Later, when I was in the Army, in Austria, they didn't play any country music on the Armed Forces radio, just big band, and I'd hear Slam Stewart [of Slim & Slam] humming along with his bass, so I started practicing that—humming some hot licks and then trying to find them on the fiddle. When I got with the Wills band in 1949, Bob would let me hum along on the bandstand. My son Dick sometimes does that playing bass, too, and my granddaughter Emily Gimble can scat, humming along with her jazz piano solos."
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