Mark O’Connor

He was born in Seattle on 5 August 1961 and grew up in Mountlake Terrace, Washington. He had studied classical and flamenco guitar for five years before he took up the fiddle at eleven. His first fiddle teacher, from November 1972, was Barbara Lamb, then only fourteen herself, and within seven months he was entering the youngest division of the National Old-Time Fiddlers’ Contest in Weiser, Idaho, where he placed second in 1973. That summer he met the Texas fiddler Benny Thomasson, who offered to teach him for nothing; for years afterward Thomasson was his principal teacher, in day-long and sometimes weekend-long lessons built mostly on breakdowns. The French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli later became his other great mentor.

At Weiser he won the junior divisions in 1974 and took the seventeen-and-under title four years in a row, through 1977. A rule change then let him into the open Grand Champion division at sixteen; he finished second to Herman Johnson in 1978, and in 1979, at seventeen, became the youngest National Old-Time Fiddle Champion. He won the title again in 1980, 1981 and 1984, and then gave up contests. In 1975, at thirteen, he had won the Grand Master Fiddler Championship in Nashville, sponsored by WSM and the Grand Ole Opry and open to players of all ages, and the same year he won the National Flat Pick Guitar Championship at Winfield, Kansas, a title he took twice. At nineteen he won the Buck White International Mandolin Championship in Kerrville, Texas. Recordings of his contest rounds from 1975 to 1984 were issued in 1990 as The Championship Years.

At twelve he made his Grand Ole Opry debut, introduced by Roy Acuff, and signed with Rounder Records, which released six albums by him: 4 Time National Junior Fiddle Champion, Pickin’ in the Wind (1976), Markology, On the Rampage (1980), Soppin’ the Gravy (1981) and False Dawn (1983). Markology, recorded when he was sixteen, has him on guitar only, joined by Tony Rice, David Grisman and Sam Bush, playing bluegrass standards, fiddle tunes and pieces of his own. In March 1976 he was also recorded live in Spokane with the fiddler Byron Berline and Sam Bush for the album In Concert.

In 1979, at seventeen, he was named Tony Rice’s replacement on guitar in the David Grisman Quintet. He played guitar and fiddle on David Grisman Quintet ’80 (Warner Bros., 1980) and fiddle on Grisman’s Mondo Mando, recorded in July 1981, and in the same years he toured with Grappelli, playing Carnegie Hall with him at seventeen. At nineteen he joined Steve Morse in the Dregs, the instrumental rock-fusion band, on violin and guitar; the band’s Industry Standard was nominated for a Grammy for best rock instrumental performance in 1983. Not long afterward he set the guitar aside, and for about twenty years he played almost nothing but the fiddle.

Through the 1980s he worked as a session player in Nashville, and by 2019 his name was on the credits of some 450 recordings. He played fiddle and mandolin on Doc & Merle Watson’s Guitar Album (Flying Fish, 1983), guitar and fiddle on John Hartford’s Gum Tree Canoe (1984), fiddle, viola and mandola on Emmylou Harris’s bluegrass album Angel Band (1987), and fiddle, viola, mandolin and guitar on Trio (1987) by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Harris, and he kept playing fiddle for Grisman on Home Is Where the Heart Is (1988) and Dawg ’90. In 1984 Warner Bros. signed him as an artist and producer, and he made a run of instrumental albums for the label: Meanings Of (1986), nominated for a Grammy for best country instrumental performance, Stone from Which the Arch Was Made (1987), Elysian Forest (1988) and On the Mark (1989). With Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, Jerry Douglas and the bassist Edgar Meyer he formed Strength in Numbers, playing violin, guitar and mandolin on its only album, The Telluride Sessions (1989), and in 1989 and 1990 he put together the house band for the television show American Music Shop.

The New Nashville Cats (Warner Bros., 1991) brought together more than fifty Nashville musicians, many of whom had worked sessions with him. Its version of Carl Perkins’s “Restless,” sung by Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs and Steve Wariner, reached No. 25 on the country chart, and the album won him the Grammy for best country instrumental performance in 1992. The CMA named him its Musician of the Year every year from 1991 through 1996. Heroes (1993) paired him with fourteen of the violinists he admired, among them Jean-Luc Ponty, L. Shankar, Johnny Gimble, Vassar Clements, Pinchas Zukerman and Benny Thomasson; two of its duets, with Gimble and with Byron Berline, were nominated for Grammys, and it included “The Devil Comes Back to Georgia” with Charlie Daniels, Johnny Cash, Marty Stuart and Travis Tritt.

From the 1990s he turned increasingly to composition and to classical settings. His Fiddle Concerto, commissioned by the Santa Fe Symphony, was recorded for Warner Bros. in 1995 and has been performed more than 250 times. He wrote “The Olympic Reel” for the closing ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the theme for the PBS series Liberty! The American Revolution (1997). For Sony Classical he made Appalachia Waltz (1996) and Appalachian Journey (2000) with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer; the second won the Grammy for best classical crossover album in 2001. Fanfare for the Volunteer followed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1999, and his fourth violin concerto, The American Seasons, had its premiere in Troy, New York, in April 2000. On his own OMAC label he released Hot Swing! (2001), a tribute to Grappelli with the guitarist Frank Vignola and the bassist Jon Burr; Thirty-Year Retrospective (2003), recorded with Chris Thile, Bryan Sutton and Byron House, whose “Bowtie” earned a Grammy nomination; the Americana Symphony, recorded by Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony in 2009; and The Improvised Violin Concerto, first performed at Boston’s Symphony Hall in 2011.

Teaching has run alongside the performing career. He held his first fiddle camp in 1994, modeling its five-day schedule on the Weiser contest, and from 2009 published the O’Connor Method, a series of string-instruction books built on American music. He was artist in residence at UCLA in 2008–09 and at the University of Miami from 2010 to 2015, and in 2009 he was inducted into the National Fiddler Hall of Fame.

In the mid-2010s he returned to bluegrass with the O’Connor Band, a family group with his wife Maggie O’Connor on fiddle, his son Forrest O’Connor on mandolin, Forrest’s wife Kate on fiddle and vocals, Joe Smart on guitar and Geoff Saunders on bass and banjo. Its first album, Coming Home (Rounder, 2016), entered Billboard’s bluegrass albums chart at No. 1 and won the Grammy for best bluegrass album in 2017; A Musical Legacy followed in 2018. The family had planned the band as a five-year project and wound it up around 2020. Playing in it brought him back to the guitar, and on 19 April 2021 he released Markology II, an album of solo guitar dedicated to the memory of Tony Rice, with notes by Béla Fleck. His memoir, Crossing Bridges, came out in 2023, and in 2024 he and Maggie O’Connor released Life After Life, a vocal album of mostly his own songs. As of 2026 the two perform as a duo of fiddles, guitar, mandolin and voices, and with symphony orchestras.

• 1975: Grand Master Fiddler Champion
• 1979, 1980, 1981, 1984: National Old-Time Fiddle Champion, Weiser, Idaho
• 1991–1996: CMA Musician of the Year
• 1992: Grammy, best country instrumental performance (The New Nashville Cats)
• 2001: Grammy, best classical crossover album (Appalachian Journey, with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer)
• 2009: National Fiddler Hall of Fame
• 2017: Grammy, best bluegrass album (Coming Home, O’Connor Band)