Alison Krauss

Alison Maria Krauss was born in Decatur, Illinois, on 23 July 1971, and grew up in nearby Champaign. Her mother played banjo and guitar, and at her mother’s insistence she began classical violin lessons at five, keeping them up until she was eleven. In 1979, when a fiddle contest was announced for the Champaign County Fair, her mother bought a bluegrass fiddle instruction book and Richard Greene’s 1977 album Duets; Krauss learned “Tennessee Waltz” and other pieces from it by ear and, at eight, placed fourth in the novice class. In 1981 and 1982 she fiddled and sang in Marvin Lee Flessner’s country dance band, and at 13 she won the fiddle championship at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas; the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America named her the most promising fiddler in the Midwest. At its festivals she first met Dan Tyminski, around 1984.

From the age of 12 she played in Silver Rail, a band led by the bassist and songwriter John Pennell, who renamed it Union Station when he learned that another group had the name. She made her first record in December 1985, Different Strokes, with the fiddler Jim Hoiles, the guitarist Swamp Weiss and her brother Viktor Krauss on bass. That year she signed with Rounder, and her first album for the label, Too Late to Cry (1987), was cut in Nashville with Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Tony Trischka and Russ Barenberg among the players. Her contract had her alternate solo albums with Union Station albums. The first band album, Two Highways (1989), set traditional pieces such as “Wild Bill Jones” and “Beaumont Rag” beside the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider.” Her solo I’ve Got That Old Feeling (1990), recorded in Nashville with Jeff White, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan and Douglas, was her first album to reach the Billboard country chart and won her first Grammy, at the 1991 ceremony; the IBMA made it its Album of the Year.

The band album Every Time You Say Goodbye (1992), the first with Ron Block, Barry Bales, Adam Steffey and Tim Stafford, won the Best Bluegrass Album Grammy and was the IBMA’s Album of the Year in 1993. That year, at 21, she joined the Grand Ole Opry, its youngest member at the time and the first bluegrass artist to join in 29 years. In 1994 she made I Know Who Holds Tomorrow with the Cox Family, Tyminski replaced Stafford in Union Station, and her duet with the band Shenandoah, “Somewhere in the Vicinity of the Heart,” took her into the country Top Ten for the first time and won a Grammy. Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection (1995), a set of older recordings and new covers, went double platinum, and its version of Keith Whitley’s “When You Say Nothing at All” reached No. 3 on the Billboard country chart. At the 1995 CMA Awards she was nominated four times and won all four: Female Vocalist of the Year, the Horizon Award, Single of the Year for the Whitley cover and Vocal Event of the Year for the Shenandoah duet.

The Union Station album So Long So Wrong (1997) won another Best Bluegrass Album Grammy. Her solo Forget About It (1999) was certified gold and gave her a song on the adult contemporary chart, “Stay.” Steffey left the band in 1998 and Douglas, who had played on her records since Too Late to Cry, became a member. In 2000 she sang on the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, including “Down to the River to Pray” and “I’ll Fly Away” with Gillian Welch, while Tyminski sang “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” for George Clooney’s character. The soundtrack sold more than seven million copies and won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2002, and she and the album were credited with reviving interest in bluegrass. Her only No. 1 country hit came in 2000, as a featured singer on Kenny Rogers’s “Buy Me a Rose.”

Union Station’s New Favorite (2001) won the Best Bluegrass Album Grammy, and its single “The Lucky One” won Grammys of its own. Live (2002), recorded at the Louisville Palace, was certified double platinum and won the Grammy and the IBMA’s Album of the Year, and Lonely Runs Both Ways (2004) went gold. At the Academy Awards in February 2004 she performed the two songs she had sung for Cold Mountain, “The Scarlet Tide” and “You Will Be My Ain True Love,” both nominated for Best Original Song. Earlier that month, three wins at the 46th Grammy Awards had taken her total to seventeen, past Aretha Franklin’s, the most by a woman at the time. Her duet with Brad Paisley, “Whiskey Lullaby,” won the CMA’s Musical Event and Music Video awards in 2004.

She has also worked as a producer, for the Cox Family, Reba McEntire and Alan Jackson among others. She produced Nickel Creek’s first album (2000) and its follow-up, This Side (2002), which brought her first Grammy as a producer.

Raising Sand (2007), her album of duets with Robert Plant, was certified platinum and won all five Grammys it was nominated for at the 2009 ceremony, among them Album of the Year and Record of the Year for “Please Read the Letter.” Union Station’s Paper Airplane (April 2011) became her highest-charting album, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and topping the country and bluegrass charts, and won Best Bluegrass Album. In 2014 the band toured with Willie Nelson and Family. Windy City (Capitol, February 2017), an album of country and bluegrass standards produced by Buddy Cannon, was her first solo album in 17 years and drew two Grammy nominations, and a second album with Plant, Raise the Roof (November 2021), was nominated for three. In 2025 Union Station returned with Arcadia, its first album since 2011, with Russell Moore singing in Tyminski’s place; it was a nominee for Best Bluegrass Album at the 2026 Grammys. The same year the IBMA named her Female Vocalist of the Year for the fifth time.

As of 2025 she had won 27 Grammy Awards from 46 nominations. She was the woman with the most Grammy wins until Beyoncé passed her total in 2021, and her six wins for Best Bluegrass Album, five of them with Union Station, are the most in that category.

• 1990, 1991, 1993, 1995, 2025: IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year
• 1991, 1995: IBMA Entertainer of the Year (with Union Station)
• 1993: Grand Ole Opry membership
• 1995: CMA Female Vocalist of the Year and Horizon Award
• 2019: National Medal of Arts
• 2021: Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame
• 2024: Order of Lincoln, Illinois’s highest civilian honor