Mike Feagan

He started on guitar at ten and took up the fiddle at nineteen, drawn by the playing of Kenny Baker and Bobby Hicks. His first professional job was with the Boys from Indiana. He then played for Monroe, and in January 1988 he was in the studio with Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys at Sound Stage Studio in Nashville for Southern Flavor (MCA), fiddling alongside Buddy Spicher and Bobby Hicks with Tom Ewing on guitar, Blake Williams on banjo and Tater Tate or Roy Huskey on bass. He went on to play country music with Dean Dillon, Mel McDaniel, Jerry Reed and Doug Stone.

Back in bluegrass, he was one of the fiddlers, with Bobby Hicks and Shad Cobb, on David Peterson & 1946’s The Howling Blue Winds (Zion Mountain Music, 2003), recorded at Mountainside Studio in Nashville. He played for Melvin Goins, fiddling on America’s Favorite Hymns (Ol’ Blue, 2005) by Goins’s group America’s Bluegrass Band, and for Kody Norris. In January 2007 he joined Larry Sparks & the Lonesome Ramblers on fiddle and harmony vocals, with Sparks, Jackie Kincaid on mandolin, Josh McMurray on banjo and Larry D. Sparks on bass, and he played on Sparks’s I Don’t Regret a Mile (2008), recorded at Jordan Recording Studio in Covington, Kentucky. The same year he made his own instrumental album, A Fiddler’s Journey (2007), with Sparks on guitar, Butch Robins on banjo and Jesse Brock on mandolin, playing numbers such as “Monroe’s Blues,” “Cherokee Shuffle” and “Old Dangerfield.”

With Peter Rowan, Buddy Spicher, Ernie Sykes, Roland White and Blake Williams he played on Becky Buller’s “Southern Flavor,” which the IBMA named Recorded Event of the Year in 2015. In August 2024 he joined the Tennessee Bluegrass Band, led by the banjo player Lincoln Hensley and the mandolinist Tim Laughlin, while continuing to play all of Sparks’s dates. He has played professionally for some forty years and lives north of Nashville.