Aubrey Haynie

He was born on 27 March 1974 and began fiddle lessons at nine with Ted Locke, a cousin of his grandmother. Two years later he took up the mandolin as well, and he was soon playing with the Bluegrass Parlor Band, a Tampa group founded by Tom Henderson. Fiddle contests made his name in Florida: in 1990, at sixteen, he won the contemporary division of the state fiddling championship for the second time, playing “Wild Fiddler’s Rag” and “Skater’s Waltz.” Chubby Wise, the Florida fiddler who had played with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, was an early influence, and so were Kenny Baker’s fiddle albums.

While still in high school in the early 1990s he went on the road with the country singer Aaron Tippin, and two years later he joined Clint Black’s touring band. At eighteen he moved to Nashville, where in 1992 he studied privately with Mark O’Connor, then an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University. He also played with the bluegrass band Continental Divide, and in 1995 he was one of the six pickers, with Scott Vestal, Adam Steffey, Wayne Benson, Barry Bales and Clay Jones, on the Pinecastle album Bluegrass ’95, which the IBMA named Recorded Event of the Year in 1996. In August 1996 he lost two violins and a bow when lightning set fire to Tim Austin’s Doobie Shea Studios.

His first album, Doin’ My Time (Sugar Hill, 1997), mixed his own instrumentals with covers and traditional pieces, with Ricky Skaggs, Béla Fleck and Jerry Douglas among the guests. The IBMA nominated him for Instrumental Performer of the Year in 1997 and, in 1998, for Emerging Artist and Instrumental Album of the Year. The same year he shared the IBMA’s Gospel Recorded Performance award as one of sixteen singers and players on Stanley Gospel Tradition: Songs About Our Savior. A Man Must Carry On (2000) has sixteen tracks, eleven of them his own instrumentals, played with guests including Rob Ickes, Jerry Douglas, Ronnie Bowman, Bryan Sutton, Tim O’Brien and Scott Vestal. The Bluegrass Fiddle Album (2003), an all-instrumental set with Tony Rice on guitar, Sam Bush on mandolin, Barry Bales on bass and David Talbot on banjo, won him the IBMA award that year.

By the end of the 1990s most of his work was as a session player, on fiddle and mandolin, on records by Randy Travis, Shania Twain, SHeDaisy, Faith Hill, Trisha Yearwood and Rhonda Vincent, among many others. That studio work brought the ACM’s fiddle award in 2004, 2009, 2011 and 2013. He was one of the many contributors to Celebration of Life: Musicians Against Childhood Cancer, the IBMA’s Album of the Year in 2006, and he played fiddle on Willie Nelson’s Bluegrass, released by Legacy in September 2023, alongside Barry Bales, Ron Block, Rob Ickes and Dan Tyminski.