"I took a shingle like you'd rive with a froe and cover buildings with, but I just shaped it out like a fiddle. Of course it was thicker than that. It was something like a quarter of an inch thick. Might have been a little thicker, or something. And I just shaped it out like a fiddle and I didn't put a thing on it, just made it flat up here like the rest of it was, and I just put two keys up in there. Well I stole two of my daddy's fiddle strings and put them on it. Didn't even have a fingerboard on it; just run a little out there, a flat board, you know. Well, I had a log barn, cracks, and I kept a-watching the barn, you know, for a mule to have his tail turned to one of them cracks so I could get hair out of it, you know. I did, I caught a mule's tail turned to a crack, you know, and I got right how I wanted and I started that mule out. And I pulled back on it, you know, and got my hair. A mule's tail is short; the hair wasn't longer than that. And I went to the mountains then and I cut me a dogwood stick, a limb off of a dogwood, and we went out here, and then a little limb growed up on it, you see. Well that made a fork. And I fastened my hair in that fork and I bowed it up like a rainbow. And the bow wasn't longer than that. And I don't know how I fastened the back. Seems like a cut a notch on it some way or other and put it in there. Then I went in up under a cliff where the yellow pines grow. I got me a hard ball of rosin off of that pine and rosined my bow. And that's the way I started playing the fiddle. I didn't have to learn; I just played it, you know."