Remembering Robert Byrd

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The fiddle served Robert Byrd well over the years. He recalled that on trips back to West Virginia, "People would see me with it and ask about it, and I just took it out and played a tune...It helped show I was a regular fellow and everyone seemed to like it." But because the fiddle was for Byrd an instrument of joy, he laid it down for good when his eldest grandson died in a car accident in 1982.

• Byrd Obit
• TIME's 1978 Cover Story on Byrd and Congress