About This Song

Midnight on the Water is a Texas fiddle waltz. It's usually credited to Luke Thomasson, a fiddler from the Texas Panhandle. His son Benny Thomasson, who became one of the great Texas contest fiddlers, remembered his father and uncle working it out together on the family porch around 1900. Benny later held the copyright, so some records name him as the writer. The Thomassons may not have started from nothing, though. The tune is close to the cowboy song "Old Paint," and people still argue about which came first. Benny played it with the fiddle cross-tuned to DDAD, with both outside strings dropped to D. In the 1970s musicians outside Texas picked it up, and the tune spread from there into contra dances and folk sessions. In England, Ron Kavana wrote new words to a different melody and kept the waltz as an instrumental break between verses.

The B part runs 16 bars, twice as long as the A part.