Try to listen to recordings of Mark O’Connor when he was a youngster on the competition circuit without swaying or tapping any parts of your body. Then check out some old mono recordings by such fiddlers as Benny Thomasson and Eck Robertson—players that had an influence on O’Connor (Thomasson was his early fiddling mentor). If you’ve never heard this kind of music before, you might be a little perplexed. It’s clearly based on old-time fiddling styles, kind of jazzy, a little like bluegrass, but not quite any of those things.

You’ve just discovered Texas-style fiddling, a wonderfully free and easy music despite its having been developed specifically to be played at contests. Oh, sure, you can get into all the finger-twisting variations you want, but even then, Texas fiddling never really sashays far from the dance floor.

Inspired initially by the Georgia fiddling-contest music of the 1910s and ’20s, the Texas style comes in all sorts of flavors: breakdowns, the show-off variation form on traditional tunes; slow and lyrical waltzes; polkas, either slowish and heavy in the Bohemian style or fast in the Canadian manner; schottisches, the German take on Scottish music; rags, which cut loose a little more freely than the Scott Joplin–era piano ragtime that inspired them; swing tunes, jazz standards played in Texas-fiddle style; and much more.

The basics of the style include a swinging backbeat, lots of slides (but fewer than bluegrass), plenty of ornaments (not as quick as but sassier than Celtic), rich bass lines inspired by jazz, and smooth and liquid bowing.

You don’t have to be from Texas to play Texas-style fiddling (although it does help you win contests in the Lone Star State). But it doesn’t hurt. Consider David Wallace. Now he’s a full-fledged New Yorker who teaches at Juilliard, but he came out of Texas from a family that traces its roots back to a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Wallace grew up fluent in classical as well as fiddling styles, and now spends much of his time extolling the virtues of Texas fiddling in performances and workshops around the country. With a DMA from Juilliard, sometimes he can’t help billing himself as Doc Wallace. Whatever you call him, he’s the man to ask for advice if you want to improvise fluently in the Texas style.

This doctor is definitely in, melding Texas fiddle with jazzy New York attitude and energy on the CD The Doc Wallace Trio, Live at the Living Room (available from http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/docwallacetrio).