GROESBECK, Texas – Cowboy's fiddle, like most fiddles, is ordinary. It is moody, delicate and worn – a scarred spruce and maple body married to a frayed horsehair bow.

Often imperfect. Sometimes beautiful.

Groesbeck, near the birthplace of Bob Wills, is fiddle country. And Wilmer "Cowboy" Little, a 73-year-old semiretired plumber, is its master of fiddlers.

The third Saturday in May is his day.

On this morning, he arrives as he has for 40 years to the fiddle contest he started just east of Waco, driving an old Ford XLT Lariat pickup up State Highway 164 to Groesbeck City Park.

He moves over to an unremarkable metal pavilion and climbs up the AstroTurf-wrapped stage.

"OK, fiddle players, listen up," he says, soft green-gray eyes and a kindly face twinkling under a straw hat.

The crowd is thinner than years past – 16 fiddlers and a hundred or so spectators. Gas prices just keep rising, and the Texas Old Time Fiddlers Association only claims about 500 members to begin with. They travel weekend to weekend along the fiddle circuit, stopping at contests rooted for decades in small towns across the state.

In Groesbeck on this Saturday morning, wildflower girls again mingle with old men in Wranglers with monogrammed leather belts.

There's Bill May, a 77-year-old who ran over his fiddles with his truck a few years back. Bill first came here in the late 1960s, when Cowboy started the contest on a half-moon of concrete outside the Limestone County courthouse. He still travels the circuit even though he says his budget is tighter than any string on his fiddle.

There's Earl Garner, king of today's over-65 crop, wiry and weathered and smoking a cigarette off on the grass. Cowboy has known Earl for decades.

There's Mia Orosco, a 14-year-old classically trained whiz from Lorena, and Jordan Franklin, kin to champion fiddle player Lewis Franklin.

Cowboy left his fiddle at home. He's master of ceremonies on this day.

"Anybody can't just get up there and keep a crowd alive all day long," he says. "If you let a crowd slump off, first thing you know they're going to be half-asleep."

The crowd will tell you fiddle music is about a lot of things. Memories. Links between fathers and sons and daughters. The rhythm of a place.

But the violin's country twin won't make you rich. Old-time Texas fiddle music doesn't pay much anymore. The winner of the Groesbeck contest in each age division takes $125, barely enough for gas to get home in some cases. The state champion, named each April in Hallettsville, gets $1,500.

By 10:30 a.m. in Groesbeck, bows are again flyin' over steel strings in a blur of wrists, forearms and fingers. Cowboy hollers in the microphone and boots start tapping. The 40th annual Southwest Fiddlers Championship is under way.

"It kind of talks to you," 67-year-old Odell Saunders says of the music.

"Just brings back memories. It'll calm me down after a hard day."

Groesbeck (pop. 4,291) was built by hard days; by oil and cotton fields, Indians, railroads and music. The town's legend dates to May 1836, when Comanches raided a frontier settlement at nearby Fort Parker, capturing a 9-year-old girl named Cynthia Ann Parker. The girl, raised by the tribe, gave birth to the last great Comanche chief, Quanah Parker.

A half-century later, in 1905, Bob Wills – the King of Western Swing – was born onto the same Limestone County prairie to a family of renowned fiddlers. He moved away about seven years later, but Wills stories still float through these parts like ghosts.

Cowboy, growing up nearby, and his mom would fire up the old battery-powered radio on Saturday nights, sticking a wire out the window for an antenna to listen to the Grand Ole Opry. He soon wore out her broomsticks, so he got a real Silvertone guitar.

"When I was in high school, we had a little jamboree down in the country at an old church house. They got me up there singing a song, and this guy says, 'Look here, we've got a cowboy in the house,' looking down and seeing my cowboy boots, you know. That's where it started."

Cowboy had a pretty good run back in the day, playing honky tonks, nightclubs, dances and beer joints from Bryan to Waco. He opened his plumbing business to pay the bills, got married and had a son who still lives in town.

"I learned how to play on this other guy's fiddle. He would say, 'Keep my fiddle over the weekend, Cowboy. I'm gonna go get drunk and I don't want to break it.' "

The fiddle Cowboy plays today lives inside an old duct-taped case. It was his father-in-law's.

Things of late have gotten a bit more lonesome. Cowboy's wife died five years ago. He lives alone, in the house they built, with a Chihuahua named Chico.

On an old piece of Mutual of Omaha life insurance junk mail, he's scribbled titles of songs written in his head. Mostly unadorned country ballads, stripped to the bone, of everyday loves and deaths. They're about horses with big red wings flyin' through clouds of gold and silvery beams. Of meeting his wife. Of sitting on a front porch swing listening to the whippoorwill sing:

A sad song from high up in the tree

I wonder if he's lonely.

Life alone it ain't so great.

And I wonder if that old whippoorwill is half as lonesome as me.

The music is a tonic for loneliness in this part of Texas. Cowboy travels most Saturday nights to small-town country music jamborees.

But the fiddle contest remains his lifetime's work.

"Man, if he ever drops out of this thing or anything ever happens to him, it will just devastate it," says Ernest Hoffpauir, who works the local oil fields and has known Cowboy for years. "He's the heart."

Karl Shiflett, who grew up in Groesbeck and is leader of the bluegrass band The Karl Shiflett & Big Country Show, first came to the contest as a boy. It's where he discovered the fiddle.

"At one time, fiddlers came from everywhere to come to Groesbeck," he said.

They came from as far away as Oklahoma and California. Fiddlers like Texas Shorty, world champions Carl and E.J. Hopkins, and Sleepy Johnson, who played with Wills.

"Bob Wills said there's a difference between a fiddle and a violin.

"He said a violin you carry in the front door. The fiddle you have to carry in the back door," says 82-year-old Harvey Norris, watching from the crowd.

"Or he said to make it a little more plain, 'You carry a violin in a case and a fiddle in a flour sack.' "

For 34 years, Mr. Norris has been the master of ceremonies at the state fiddle championship in Hallettsville.

"When they're playing one of these old tunes, and they hit it just right, the hair on my arm will stand up, and I'll get goose bumps all over," he says.

"There's something about it that it touches your soul, and not just your ears."

Most of the songs have been around for more than a half-century: "Soppin' the Gravy," "Allentown Polka," "Sally Johnson" and the "Westphalia Waltz."

As the performers play on, Cowboy lassos the air and hollers.

By 2:30 p.m., the contest is down to four fiddlers competing for the $250 grand prize.

Fifteen minutes later, it's two. Then one: Julie Amundson.

"I just want to thank the crowd and the sponsors and Cowboy, and we always have fun here," she says. "And we'll be back again next year."

Cowboy takes the microphone one last time.

"Is that it, ladies and gentlemen? I think I shall go to the house and say hello to my little dog Chico."

Offstage, he smiles a far-off smile and sits down on a folding metal chair.

"I'm tired."

"We had a good one, though."

How old the Groesbeck festival is depends on whom you ask. It's advertised as being in its 42nd year. But newspapers from that time show that it started in 1968, making this its 40th anniversary. Today, it's one of about two dozen contests run by the Texas Old Time Fiddlers Association. The contests highlight the Texas style of fiddling – the "contest" style and the "Texas long bow." The group will be in Early today and Whitewright on May 31.