From A Fiddlin' Family

Family clearly comes first for Will Bush.

Fiddling is second.

And the two are inexorably intertwined.

Bush says he was maybe 6 years old when he started asking for a violin.

"I'm not sure where that came from," he says, but the likely inspiration was his grandfather, Bill Bush Sr., a World War II and Korean War veteran, a Washington County judge and a second-generation fiddler himself.

The fiddle was the language grandfather and grandson shared.

"I talked and talked" to his grandmother, Bush says, "but with him, I just played."

Bush was always close to his grandparents, he says, recalling clambering off the school bus just to climb on his bike and ride down the road to their 300-acre farm. After fifth grade, some family upheaval sent Bush to live with his grandparents until ninth grade.

His grandfather, he says, "had kind of hung up the fiddle, but I pestered him every day to play."

In the beginning, Bush says, "I tried to imitate his every note -- even his every mistake." His grandfather didn't always know the name of a song, he says, but he has lists made by his grandmother -- "she had beautiful penmanship" -- identifying the catalog they shared. He also has a fiddle belonging to his great-grandfather, who was a preacher in the Vineyard community near Lincoln, but it's generally stored safely in its case. He did bring it out to play for Larry Foley's "Up Among the Hills," "but it's pretty rickety," he says.

When Bush speaks and plays his own instrument Wednesday at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale, his topic will be "Fiddle Tunes Grandpa Played." That's exactly what he plans to feature, but Bush has his own musical story. He majored in musical performance at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and performs regularly with the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas, the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra and the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra in Little Rock. He also teaches at his own studio on Emma Avenue. His students, he says, are about half fiddlers and half violinists.

That's how Bush met Susan Young, outreach coordinator for the Shiloh Museum.

"He came walking up the sidewalk in the fall, looking for a place for his students to have a Christmas recital," she recalls. She says he had roots in the Ozarks and a business in downtown Springdale, perfect reasons to adopt him into the Shiloh Museum family.

That was two Christmases ago, but Young remembers clearly how Bush impressed her, guiding students from 3 to 60 years old "with the same kind and gentle spirit."

"He's got a gift for teaching," she says.

When Young asked, Bush was happy to take the opportunity to talk about his grandfather and their shared love of music.

"Lots of the tunes I learned from him are in the standard catalog of fiddle tunes, but he had his own way of playing, for sure," he says. "I'll try to do my best imitation of him."