Want to find out Damian Green’s musical hero? The 16-year-old fiddler likes to tell a joke about Jascha Heifetz, the most famous classical violinist of the 20th century. “There’s this story that Heifetz was trying to get his dog into his hotel room,” he says. “The manager stopped him, and the violinist puffed up and said, ‘But I’m Jascha Heifetz.’ The manager said, ‘I don’t care if you’re Bob Wills, you’re not bringing that dog in here.’”

Sure, Green knows his way around the classical violin; he has a lot of concertos in his fingers, and he plays in an orchestra in his native Texas. But at heart, he’s less of a Jascha Heifetz fan than a keeper of the flame of the great Texas swing fiddler Bob Wills. Wills and his Texas Playboys played country dance tunes as if they were jazz numbers. Wills didn’t invent Texas swing in the 1930s, but he pretty much perfected it, and he’s Damian Green’s hero.

In fact, Green keeps getting compared to Wills, both in his playing and his stage presence. That’s how Green wants it.

“Yes sir,” he says with his polite Texas accent. “I like his overall charisma, the way he moved on stage, the way he got the audience going. I collect a bunch of Bob Wills recordings, and I listen to those a lot, and learn a lot, and I even get to play with the Texas Playboys and learn from them in person.”

That’s right. He hasn’t even graduated from high school, but Green already has played with the old Bob Wills band, not to mention his touring with the famed Texas swing group Asleep at the Wheel in a tribute show called A Ride with Bob. The subject, you might guess, is Bob Wills. When Green, the band, and the show’s other participants played at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., a few months ago, Green even got to shake hands with a big fan of Texas swing: President George W. Bush.