He played throughout Central and East Texas in saloons and pleasure palaces, for weddings and funerals. Simon had a hair-trigger temper and he knew it, and all his life it had been impressed upon him to contain himself because he could end up in jail with his fiddle confiscated or stolen. The last thing he ought to do was get into a brawl with the conscription men. So he lived in the bright strains of mountain music and the reflective, running pools of the Irish light airs that brought peace to his mind and to his audiences; peace soon forgotten, always returned to.
