Bruce Molsky

He was born in New York City in 1955 and grew up in the Bronx. He started guitar at seven, after the Jazzmobile program brought Billy Taylor to his public school, and at about twelve, when his sister gave him Doc Watson’s first LP, he heard “Black Mountain Rag.” As a teenager he saw Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, Curly Ray Cline and Tex Logan in New York concerts. In 1972 he went to Cornell University to study architecture and engineering; there he heard the Highwoods String Band, took up the banjo and, six months later, the fiddle, and after two years he left. Back in New York he played at the weekly sessions in Manhattan and the fiddlers’ convention at the South Street Seaport, and in 1976 he visited Tommy Jarrell in North Carolina.

He then moved to Rockbridge County, Virginia, took a job laying out machinery at a carpet mill, and joined the old-time scene around Lexington, where the banjo player Odell McGuire led trips to visit older musicians in the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia. His fiddle can be heard on a 1976 album from the Galax Old Fiddler’s Convention and on a 1977 anthology of old-time fiddling, and he played on Bob Carlin’s Banging & Sawing (1985) and Rounder’s The Young Fogies (1985). He later moved to Atlanta with his wife, Audrey, a guitarist, worked as an engineer, and taught at music camps. With Carlin he made Take Me As I Am (Marimac, 1989). He immersed himself in Alan Lomax’s field recordings and old country records, and he has described trying, for years, to sound like Jarrell, William Hamilton Stepp and the Kentucky fiddlers John Salyer and Luther Strong before finding his own voice, and working out bowing patterns that layer rhythm so that he can sing while he fiddles.

At 40 he left engineering for music. His first solo album, Warring Cats (1993), started his own Tree Frog Music label, and Rounder released Lost Boy (1996), with Dirk Powell, Bruce Molsky & Big Hoedown (1997), Poor Man’s Troubles (2000) and Contented Must Be (Rounder Select, 2004), with Darol Anger, Mike Compton, Dudley Connell and Mick Moloney; Compass issued Soon Be Time (2006). With Anger, the Cajun fiddler Michael Doucet and the cellist Rushad Eggleston he made Fiddlers 4 (Compass, 2002), which was nominated for a Grammy. In 2002 he became a founding member of Mozaik, the band Andy Irvine formed with Dónal Lunny, Nikola Parov and Rens van der Zalm, in which he sings and plays fiddle, guitar and banjo; its albums include Live from the Powerhouse (2004), Changing Trains (2006) and The Long and the Short of It (2019).

His work since has been mostly collaborative. He appeared on the BBC’s Transatlantic Sessions with Aly Bain and Jerry Douglas, played on Annbjørg Lien’s Waltz with Me (2008) and Tony Trischka’s Territory (Smithsonian Folkways, 2008), made Meeting Point (2013), live at the Liverpool Philharmonic, with Aly Bain and Ale Möller, and Rauland Rambles (2016) with Ånon Egeland and Arto Järvelä. In 2015 he sang and played on Anonymous 4’s Civil War program 1865: Songs of Hope and Home, which took him to NPR’s Tiny Desk, and played fiddle, guitar and banjo on Mark Knopfler’s Tracker. His own later records are the unaccompanied If It Ain’t Here When I Get Back (2013), Can’t Stay Here This A-Way (2016), two albums with the trio Molsky’s Mountain Drifters, with Allison de Groot on banjo and Stash Wyslouch on guitar (2016 and Closing the Gap, 2019), the solo guitar album Everywhere You Go (February 2022) and Lockdown Breakdown (July 2024), a twin-fiddle record with Darol Anger.

He teaches at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where his title is Visiting Scholar in the American Roots Music Program, and has produced records for younger players, among them Tatiana Hargreaves’s Started Out to Ramble (2009) and Adrianna Ciccone’s The Back of Winter (2015), which won her Instrumentalist of the Year at the Canadian Folk Music Awards.