Jonathan Yudkin

He played fiddle and mandolin on Hartford’s Annual Waltz, recorded in the summer of 1986 at Jack Clement’s Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa in Nashville with Mark Howard, Roy Huskey Jr. and Kenny Malone, Clement producing, and issued by MCA in 1987; it includes “Short Life of Trouble” and the title waltz. In 1989 he was one of the two fiddlers, with Holly O’Dell, in the Hartford String Band on Down on the River (Flying Fish), recorded at the same studio about September 1989, on which he also sang; it includes “Old Time River Man,” “Here I Am in Love Again” and “I Wish We Had Our Time Again.” That year he also played fiddle and mandolin with the Doug Dillard Band, alongside Ginger Boatwright, Roger Rasnake and David Grier, on Heartbreak Hotel (Flying Fish, 1989), recorded in Branson, Missouri.

His later session work runs well beyond bluegrass: his own list of credits includes records by Leon Russell (“My Atchafalaya Girl”), Robert Earl Keen, Tammy Wynette, Shania Twain (Up), Rascal Flatts, Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban, Kenny Rogers and Taylor Swift’s re-recorded “Breathe.” He has worked on the music for Hallmark’s Christmas at Graceland films, and in 2022 and 2023 he played the Blanco y Negro world tour, 165 concerts in all, while producing bluegrass records for Marty Falle.