Byron Berline

Byron Douglas Berline was born on 6 July 1944 in Caldwell, Kansas, near the Oklahoma border, the youngest of five children of Lue and Elizabeth Berline. His father farmed and played fiddle and banjo at barn dances, and his mother played piano. He started on a three-quarter-size fiddle at five, won his first contest at ten, against his father, and counted Eck Robertson among his early influences. He went to the University of Oklahoma on a football scholarship in 1963; when he broke his hand that fall he turned more to music, and it was while he was playing in a campus folk group that the Dillards heard him.

They brought him in for Pickin’ & Fiddlin’ (Elektra, 1965), an album of old-time fiddle tunes in bluegrass arrangements, recorded when he was twenty-one. The record is built on his syncopated bowing and double stops, and after hearing it the folklorist Ralph Rinzler invited Berline and his father to play as a duo at the Newport Folk Festival that July. There he jammed with Bill Monroe and joined three other fiddlers behind him on stage for “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and “Walls of Time,” issued later by Vanguard. Monroe offered him a job, and the same year he won the national fiddle championship at Weiser, Idaho, for the first time.

He finished his degree first, graduating in 1967, and joined the Blue Grass Boys in March, in Richard Greene’s place. On 23 August 1967 at Columbia’s studio in Nashville, with Roland White on guitar, Vic Jordan on banjo and James Monroe on bass, the band recorded three instrumentals with Berline on fiddle: “The Gold Rush,” which he and Monroe wrote together, “Sally Goodin’” and “Virginia Darlin’.” In September he was drafted into the Army.

Discharged in 1969, he moved to Los Angeles at Doug Dillard’s urging and played on Dillard & Clark’s Through the Morning, Through the Night. Gram Parsons recommended him to the Rolling Stones, and that year he played the fiddle on “Country Honk,” their country version of “Honky Tonk Women” on Let It Bleed; asked to play the part again on the sidewalk outside the Elektra studio on Sunset Boulevard, he left the car horns of the street on the record. He joined the Flying Burrito Brothers in 1971 and is on their live albums Last of the Red Hot Burritos and Six Days on the Road: Live in Amsterdam, and he played on Stephen Stills’s first Manassas album. In 1971, when Dillard & Clark broke up, he and the bassist Roger Bush formed Country Gazette; with Kenny Wertz on guitar and Alan Munde on banjo it made A Traitor in Our Midst! (1972) and Don’t Give Up Your Day Job (1973) for United Artists, and Berline stayed until 1975.

His session work in those years included instrumentals for Bob Dylan’s soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), on which he also sang in the background on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” Gram Parsons’s GP (1973) and Grievous Angel (1974), and an overdubbed fiddle on the Band’s “Acadian Driftwood” (1976). He also recorded with Elton John, Rod Stewart, Emmylou Harris and, later, Lucinda Williams. In March 1976 he played a concert in Spokane, Washington, with Sam Bush and the fourteen-year-old Mark O’Connor, issued as In Concert; on it he plays fiddle and mandolin and sings “Teardrops in My Eyes.”

With the guitarist Dan Crary and the banjo player John Hickman he formed Byron Berline & Sundance, whose first album came out on MCA in 1976; Vince Gill later played mandolin in the band, and Live at McCabe’s followed in 1977. He also made albums under his own name, among them Dad’s Favorites (1977). In 1981 the three men regrouped as Berline, Crary & Hickman, recording for independent labels such as Sugar Hill and Rounder; with Steve Spurgin and John Moore added, the band became California, which the IBMA named Instrumental Group of the Year in 1992, 1993 and 1994. He had a small part as a musician in the film The Rose (1979), appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and played on soundtracks including Basic Instinct and Northern Exposure. His album Fiddle and a Song (1995), with Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Vince Gill and Mason Williams as guests, was nominated for the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album.

In April 1995 he and his wife, Bette, moved to Guthrie, Oklahoma, and opened the Double Stop Fiddle Shop, named for the technique of bowing two strings at once; the Byron Berline Band grew out of the jam sessions in its upstairs hall, and in 1996 he and the state representative Joe Hutchinson founded the Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival in Guthrie. Berline, Crary & Hickman’s Chambergrass, on Sugar Hill, won Dan Crary the IBMA award for liner notes in 2003, and in 2012 the IBMA gave Berline its Distinguished Achievement Award. The shop burned down on 23 February 2019 with much of its stock of old instruments; he reopened across the street as the Double Stop Fiddle Shop and Music Hall. He died in Oklahoma City on 10 July 2021, four days after his seventy-seventh birthday.

• 1965, 1967, 1970: National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest champion, Weiser, Idaho
• 1992, 1993, 1994: IBMA Instrumental Group of the Year (California)
• 2012: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
• 2026: Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame
• National Fiddler Hall of Fame