Natalie Padilla

Recording Artist · Active 2017–present · Also a musician

Natalie Padilla is a fiddler, composer and teacher raised in Montana, a contest fiddler since early childhood who was a founding member of the Colorado band Masontown and later played with the Vermont band Low Lily. Her titles include National Small Fry Fiddle Champion in 1994, National Young Adult and National Twin Fiddling Champion in 2015, and Kentucky State Fiddle Champion in 2022, and she has made four albums of her own instrumental compositions.

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She grew up in Montana in a musical family. Her mother, Nancy Padilla, is a fiddler, and Natalie began playing casually at three, played her first contest at five, took up the violin at six and learned the Texas, or contest, style of fiddling. Her first title was Montana State Pee Wee Fiddle Champion; in 1994 she was the Small Fry champion at the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest. She also trained as a classical violinist, earning a bachelor of music at the University of Northern Colorado, and has played violin with the Bozeman Symphony, the Greeley Philharmonic Orchestra and Opera Colorado, among others.

She lived in Colorado for more than a decade. In 2011 she recorded Fiddle & Flute, a collaboration in traditional Irish music with Blayne Chastain and Peter Romero. In 2015 she won the National Young Adult Fiddle and National Twin Fiddling championships, the Rocky Mountain Regional Grand Championship and the RockyGrass fiddle contest. That year she was among the founding members of Masontown, a Front Range bluegrass and old-time band with the guitarist Eric Wiggs, the mandolin player Mike Canney and the bassist Bradley Morse, who had met at local jams; it released Masontown (EP, 2015), In This Time (2017) and Age (2020). By late 2017 she was living in Lyons, heading the folk and bluegrass studies program at the University of Northern Colorado and hosting a weekly old-time jam in Denver.

Her own albums of original music began with Paths & Places (2017), produced by Joe K. Walsh, and Fireweed (2019), which she produced with Ben Winship. In 2022 she won the Kentucky State Fiddle Championship. Hell Broke Loose (2023) is an old-time fiddle album with Casey Campbell and Tyler Andal, and Montana Wildflower (2023) set her compositions in Celtic and old-time arrangements with the Canadian guitarist and producer Quinn Bachand. Bachand also produced Eostre, released on April 22, 2025, nine original instrumentals, each named for a deity or spirit of nature, on which she plays fiddle, banjo and guitar.

She later joined Low Lily, a Vermont-based band whose music mixes old-time and Celtic influences, and as of 2025 she is based in western Massachusetts. She has taught at camps including RockyGrass Academy, Walker Creek Music Camp, Targhee Bluegrass Camp and Montana Fiddle Camp.

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