Michael Cleveland

Recording Artist · Active 1998–present · Clark County · Also a musician
Traditional Bluegrass Contemporary Bluegrass

Michael Cleveland is the most awarded fiddler in bluegrass and one of the hardest-driving players the music has produced — twelve times the IBMA’s Fiddle Player of the Year, a Grammy winner, and the leader of Flamekeeper, itself a seven-time IBMA Instrumental Group of the Year. Born legally blind, he plays with an aggression and a rhythmic certainty that put him closer to Kenny Baker and Bobby Hicks than to any of his contemporaries.

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  • Born September 18, 1980, in southern Indiana and raised in Henryville, he was taken to a bluegrass festival at four, heard a fiddler play “Orange Blossom Special,” and asked for a fiddle.
  • He learned the Suzuki method at the Kentucky School for the Blind in Louisville, playing violin at school and fiddle at home — formal technique feeding a traditional repertoire from the start.
  • At nine he turned up at Bill Monroe’s Bean Blossom festival, impressed Monroe in an open jam, and ended up onstage with him — a direct line back to the source that he has never made much noise about.
  • Out of high school he went to work as a sideman with Dale Ann Bradley and then Rhonda Vincent, learning the road in two of the better bands of the era.
  • His first Rounder record, Flame Keeper, won him the IBMA Fiddle Player of the Year award in 2002, at twenty-one.
  • He formed his own band, Flamekeeper, in 2006, and it has since taken the IBMA’s Instrumental Group of the Year award seven times.
  • Twelve Fiddle Player of the Year awards followed the first, and the National Fiddler Hall of Fame inducted him in 2018.
  • Tall Fiddler won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album, two years after a nomination in the same category — Charlestown, Indiana declared a Michael Cleveland Day for it in February 2020.
  • In 2022 the National Endowment for the Arts made him a National Heritage Fellow, the country’s highest honor for a traditional artist; its citation calls him the bluegrass fiddler of his generation.
  • His playing runs through this catalog on Monroe material — “Jerusalem Ridge,” “Bluegrass Stomp,” “New Camptown Races” — and on fiddle tunes cut with the fierce, no-vibrato bow arm that makes him identifiable in two notes.

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