A world champion fiddler

The guitar, by decree of the 1977 Texas legislature, is the state instrument of Texas. With apologies to and deep respect for that fine instrument, we’re going to say the fiddle did the most to shape the state’s music in its early days. Not that it was easy for the fiddle, even if you call it a violin. 

In the state’s early days, the fiddle had to fight a perception that it was an instrument of the devil and that a talent for playing it could only be acquired through a deal with same. Fiddlers were depicted as lazy, hard-drinking and generally worthless human beings who drew one step closer to hell with every note they played. 

And yet there was a persistent demand for fiddle music, especially in rural places where music provided one of the few social diversions available. Of the many who established a high standard for Texas fiddle playing, Alexander “Eck” Robertson deserves the most credit. Aside from being a very good player of the fiddle, he was also the first to record country music for commercial release. 

Eck grew up outside Amarillo into a family of fiddlers until his father entered the ministry and withdrew from the instrument. Eck is surely the only Texas fiddler who crafted his first fiddle (when he was eight-years-old) by shooting the family cat, stretching the hide over a large gourd and stringing it with hair from a mare’s tail. 

“It’s the meanest trick I ever done,” he later told an Amarillo newspaper. 

The family’s cats breathed a sigh of relief when Eck traded a pig for a store-bought Sears and Roebuck fiddle but Eck’s father did not. Eck began sneaking  out of the house at night to fiddle at local dances. By 16 he was on the road, fiddling full time for traveling medicine shows in Oklahoma.

 Eck met an Oklahoma fiddler named Henry C. Gilliand, who happened to be friends with lawyer Marvin Littleton, who happened to represent the Victor Recording Company. Littleton arranged for Gilliand and Eck to record some tunes at the Victor studios in New York City in June of 1922. That’s how Eck Robertson happened to record music aimed at a rural audience at a time when record companies either didn’t know or didn’t care if such an audience existed. 

 The two men recorded “Arkansaw Traveler” their first day in the Big Apple. Eck returned by himself the next day to record five more tunes, including “Sallie Gooden and “Done Gone.” 

Critics, scholars and fiddler generally agree that Eck’s recording of “Sallie Gooden” is the genesis of modern-style Texas fiddling.

“The first time I heard him (Robertson) play ‘Sallie Gooden,’ my thought was this guy is playing that style as well as it can be played,” Austin fiddler Erik Hokkanen told Texas Highways in 2022. “A hundred years later and nobody’s topped him.”

Matt Brown, another Panhandle fiddler of note, wrote “Done Gone.” J.B. Cranfill, a doctor, preacher, publisher and prohibitionist but also a fiddler reported that Brown wrote the tune on the side of a lonely highway after the only car he saw during an entire afternoon of hitchhiking passed him by and dang near ran over him. 

Eck recorded another set of tunes for Victor in 1928. He later recorded 100 songs for the Sellers Transcription Studios in Dallas;  the loss of those tapes is one of the great misfortunes (and possibly missed fortunes) of Texas music.  

Eck never quite managed to make a living playing music but he kept playing it anyway. He was a popular performer and frequent winner at old time fiddling contests. He  appeared at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he was 78-years-old and also played the UCLA Folk Festival in California. 

There was talk of another recording but nothing ever came of it. Eck drifted back to Amarillo and then to a nursing home in Borger. He died there in 1975 at the age of 88, a mostly forgotten pioneer of Texas music. The inscription on his tombstone reads: “World’s Champion Fiddler.” 

So the next time you hear the song that claims “you just can’t play in Texas without a fiddle in the band” take a moment to remember Eck Robertson, the man who did as much as anybody to make that true.