Brian Wicklund
Brian Wicklund is a Minnesota fiddler, mandolinist and teacher who played fiddle with Stoney Lonesome and the Kathy Kallick Band, plays with the Barley Jacks, and wrote The American Fiddle Method. He was inducted into the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame in 2024.
He took violin lessons from seven to nine. Not long after, he heard bluegrass on his mother’s Flatt and Scruggs album, and his father, also a fan, took him to Minnesota Bluegrass & Old-Time Music Association events in the Twin Cities, where older musicians taught him to fiddle. He learned from records and from tapes he made of other fiddlers, and as a teenager he won dozens of fiddle contests.
With the Twin Cities band Stoney Lonesome he played fiddle on Lonesome Tonight (Red House, 1991) and Blue Heartache (Red House, 1992), alongside Kate MacKenzie, Kevin Barnes, Chris Kaiser and Patty Shove. He released a solo album, Arrival (Openfield, 1998), and toured with the Judith Edelman Band, the Chris Stuart Band and Brother Mule.
In the Kathy Kallick Band he played fiddle on A Warmer Kind of Blue (Copper Creek, 2005), with Kallick, Avram Siegel, Tom Bekeny and Amy Stenberg. The same year he and the Idaho mandolinist Ben Winship released the duo album Big Twang, with Eric Thorin on bass and Mike Dowling on guitar on a few tracks.
With the Barley Jacks he has made three albums of original music. The latest, Coming Down the Mountain (November 2021), their first in a decade, has him on fiddle and mandolin with Mike Cramer on guitar, Kevin Rowe on bass and Joel Arpin on drums.
He is also a studio musician and producer. He wrote The American Fiddle Method, published by Mel Bay, and teaches through the American Fiddle Method online, at music camps and in private lessons, including a student group in Stillwater. In 2024, at 59, he was inducted into the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame. He lives in Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota.
