Owen took up the fiddle when he was ten.

I don't remember if his Uncle Wayne bought him a fiddle and he started taking Suzuki Method violin lessons once a week with our neighbor, Sara Casebolt, or vice versa, but he started taking lessons and Wayne paid for his first fiddle.

He got to where he could play "Mississippi Hotdog" and "Bile The Cabbage Down," a few other songs.

The Suzuki Method instructor quit and Brenda found him a teacher, Danny Taylor.

Danny thought he had a natural talent for the instrument, and urged him to try out for a scholarship at a school like Julliard, but Brenda told Danny, "He only practices once a week, at his lesson."

He went to spend some time with Janice one summer and older fiddle players would cut him, so he practiced until he got to where he could cut them, and did.

Mac Tillman heard him play, and told Brenda he was picking up some bad habits, at bluegrass festivals, improper technique, and needed some training in fundamentals, and Brenda took him to Danny every day for a month, and they really made progress.

That's about all the formal training he had, I think.

I know that Balder would go to his lessons and see what he was being taught, and, although he didn't practice it, he absorbed it, so that, when he took up the mandolin, and taught himself to play it, he was further along than he might have been.

Once Balder started playing the mandolin, he and Owen would play together, and show each other things.

And, in the summers, they'd both play with Uncle Potter, who showed them both things.

Also, Hazel showed them both things.

I know we didn't try to force either one of them to play, but we did try to see that they both got a good grounding, starting out.

Once they reached a certain level, they wanted to go beyond it. Once that happened, they were hooked.

They both hung out with Potter, and pickers Potter's age, and learned from older musicians, and each other.

You couldn't ask for better teachers.

Eventually, Owen learned from Max Tillman, and from playing in bands, like the Gillis Brothers.

Doyle Lawson wasn't that impressed with the Gillis Brothers, and taught him things that made the style he had developed more traditional and less Owen.

Balder called Owen the Chinese bebop bluegrass fiddle player from Outer Space.

He had a long-bow, bluesy style, with a lot of double-stops.

David Davis, the bandleader he plays with now, loved his style and wanted to hire him for years.

Between Doyle Lawson and David Davis Owen played with James King, who also loved Owen's fiddle playing and wanted to hire him before he hired him.

But now, Owen was going to bluegrass fiddle players and sitting in at jam sessions, soaking the repertoire, if not the fiddle technique, up.

And Balder was Pete and Repeat to Owen.

Balder was woodshedding in private.

Balder wasn't competing with Owen.

He had better sense.

They each had record players in their rooms, and tape players, and would play recorded music in their rooms. Play along with records.

What we did was make sure they had instruments, and strings, take them to festivals, and places where they could play with their uncles and aunt Janice, let them spend their allowance on records, and buy them players to play the records on.

Also, at home, they heard other kinds of music, good music, classical music, jazz, and blues, folk music-everything but country music and pop music, which Brenda and I both made fun of.

They did the rest.

In addition to playing music, and camping, at festivals, on holiday weekends Brenda and Nancy Casebolt would take Owen and Sara and Balder and Johnny Casebolt camping, to state parks and to campgrounds in the keys, or wildlife areas, to camp, fish, hike, swim, and hunt.

I guess hunting came later.

Cook, tell stories, and eat food they caught and cleaned themselves.

Run themselves ragged. Normal kid stuff.

Or maybe not so normal, judging from kids their age, who watched a lot of television and went to Disney World. Ate sugar cereal and watched television.