John Sharp: The Fiddler’s Legacy
December 2006 
Seventy years ago, John Sharp developed a method for gentling hard-to-handle horses. Today, his technique is a standard practice in wild-horse training.
This is the story of a “horse musician” – a fiddler, more precisely – who doesn’t play a conventional instrument but instead makes music with the body of a horse. To central Oregon’s John Sharp, horse training is like a fiddle song played with a bamboo pole for a bow and mustang for a violin.
Now 92 years of age, Sharp has trained thousands of wild horses. He started each one from the distance of 12 feet, the horse’s first physical contact with humankind the soothing feel of a bamboo pole gently drawn back and forth across its back and withers, a motion Sharp calls “fiddling”. The method has proven itself to be a safe, low-stress technique for gentling wild horses.
Sharp has been using this method for 70 years. He can’t quite recall how the idea presented itself, but he’s spent a lifetime perfecting the technique and the past eight years sharing it with wild-horse enthusiasts, for whom Sharp’s method has become a key part of the curriculum for gentling mustangs and other hard-to-handle horses.
