Texas Shorty and John Hartford

Chancellor was born in Dallas County, Texas, in 1943. He began on the mandolin, and as a boy he played on the radio with his older brother Allen as “Texas Al and Shorty,” which gave him his stage name. At thirteen he met the champion fiddler Benny Thomasson and switched to the fiddle under his teaching. He became the youngest fiddler to win the World Championship contest at Crockett, Texas, and later won it three years running, only the second fiddler to go undefeated there; he also won five Texas state championships and became a member of the Texas Fiddler Hall of Fame. In the 1980s he recorded Texas Shorty, World Champion Fiddler, with Mark O’Connor, Sam Bush, Robert Bowlin and Gerald Jones among the players.

Hartford had started Small Dog a’Barkin’ in 1991, and Old Sport (SD-494CD) came out on it in the same year as Hartford’s The Walls We Bounce Off Of. The album includes “Miller’s Reel,” “Liverpool Hornpipe,” “Georgia Boys,” “Midnight on the Water,” “Salt River,” “Lady’s Fancy,” “Snowbird on the Ash Bank,” “Bonapart’s Retreat” and “Jack-O-Diamonds,” and the title piece, “Old Sport,” is a breakdown that was notated from Hartford’s playing for the 1994 collection Traditional American Fiddle Tunes. When the National Endowment for the Arts named Chancellor a National Heritage Fellow in 2010, its biography of him described Old Sport as an album of old-time pieces on which he was accompanied by his friend Hartford. Hartford died in 2001.