Peter Ostroushko

Musician · 1953–2021 · Minneapolis, Minnesota
Best known for Mandolin Fiddle

Peter Ostroushko was a Minneapolis mandolinist and fiddler who played on A Prairie Home Companion for forty years and once served as its music director. His first recording session was an uncredited mandolin part on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. Over the following decades he made more than a dozen albums of his own, toured with Norman Blake, Chet Atkins and Robin and Linda Williams, and won a regional Emmy for his score to a public-television history of Minnesota.

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He was born on 12 August 1953 and grew up in the Ukrainian community of northeast Minneapolis. He picked up his father’s mandolin at three. As a teenager he soaked up the city’s folk and blues scene, listening to Dave “Snaker” Ray, “Spider” John Koerner and Tony “Little Sun” Glover from the doorway of the Triangle Bar on the West Bank before he was old enough to go in.

In 1974, when Dylan recorded part of Blood on the Tracks in Minneapolis, Ostroushko played the mandolin on “If You See Her, Say Hello,” though the album did not credit him. In 1979 he recorded Dixie Highway Sign for June Appal with Robin and Linda Williams, and in 1983 he was featured with Scott Alarik and the New Prairie Ramblers.

His solo career began on Rounder. Sluz Duz Music (1985) set American dance music in an old-world style, with Mick Moloney on tenor banjo and, on one track, Norman and Nancy Blake. Down the Streets of My Old Neighborhood (1986) brought in Chet Atkins on guitar and Johnny Gimble on fiddle alongside the pianist Butch Thompson. That same year he made First Generation for Flying Fish with Bertram Levy. Most of his later records were for Red House: Peter Ostroushko Presents the Mando Boys (1986), Buddies of Swing (1987), Blue Mesa (1989), Duo with the guitarist Dean Magraw (1991), Heart of the Heartland (1995), Pilgrims on the Heart Road (1997), Sacred Heart (2000), Meeting on Southern Soil with Norman Blake (2001), Coming Down from Red Lodge (2003), Postcards (2006), When the Last Morning Glory Blooms (2010) and The Mando Chronicles (2012). He also played mandolin on Blake’s Slow Train Through Georgia (Rounder, 1987).

Beyond the radio show, he appeared on Austin City Limits, Late Night with David Letterman and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He performed with the Minnesota Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and worked with Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson. Ken Burns used his music in three documentaries. His score for the 2005 Twin Cities Public Television series Minnesota: A History of the Land, also released on Red House, earned him a regional Emmy.

A stroke in 2018 ended his playing career, and he went on to make a podcast, My Life and Time as a Radio Musician. He died on 24 February 2021, at 67.

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