Katie Petersen
Katie Petersen is the fiddle player of the Petersens, the family band from Branson, Missouri, and the eldest of the four siblings in it. The band calls her its musical leader: she sketches the arrangement of each song the group learns. She also writes songs, and in 2023 she released a solo album, I Wrote You a Song.
Like her brother and sisters she began on piano at seven, and two years later, at nine, she chose the violin and started weekly classical lessons. When her father decided that the family would become a bluegrass band, he sent her to a fiddle camp, and she played fiddle with the Petersens from their first performances in 2005 at the First Christian Church of Mountain Grove, Missouri.
She graduated from the College of the Ozarks in 2014, where she also learned the pipe organ, and besides the fiddle she plays piano and ukulele. She later taught music and English at a school in Nicaragua through Project Hope, and she still gives music lessons alongside her work in the band.
In the band’s way of working, the singer of a song chooses the key, Katie lays out the basic arrangement and her mother, Karen, writes the chord chart; the band then plays it through and settles the details together. She plays a five-string violin. With the Petersens she plays the band’s regular shows at the Little Opry Theatre in Branson and its tours, and she is on its albums from Finally Going Home (2014) and Shenandoah (2017) through the Live Sessions series begun in 2020.
Her solo album, I Wrote You a Song, came out on 13 October 2023, preceded in August by the single “Sherwood”; its nine tracks include “I’d Call Home,” “Airplane Mode,” “Farewell Waltz” and a version of “A-Tisket a-Tasket.” As of 2026 the band’s site says she is working on more original music for herself and for the band.
