Putting old fiddler ahead of America is hard to bear (7)
I believe the answer is:
onerous
'hard to bear' is the definition.
(I've seen this before)
'putting old fiddler ahead of america' is the wordplay.
'putting old' becomes 'o' (I can't justify this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'fiddler' becomes 'nero' (I've seen this before).
'ahead of' says to put letters next to each other (some letters go in front of others).
'america' becomes 'US' (United States).
'o'+'nero'+'us'='ONEROUS'
'is' acts as a link.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for onerous that I've seen before include "Burdensome as duty may be" , "Burdensome, weighty" , "Involving a great deal of effort" , "weight" , "Burdensome, taxing" .)