Tim O’Brien

He was born on 16 March 1954, the youngest of five children, and took up music at twelve, after his sister Mollie played him a Bob Dylan record. He taught himself guitar, fiddle and mandolin, and seeing Doc Watson on television turned him toward old-time music and bluegrass. In 1973 he left Colby College and headed west to Colorado. There he played in the Town and Country Revue and then, from 1974 to 1977, the Ophelia Swing Band, and won the fiddle contest at the Rocky Mountain Bluegrass Festival twice, at twenty and twenty-one. His first solo album, Guess Who’s in Town: Eclectic Fiddle, came out in 1977.

In 1978 he formed Hot Rize with the banjo player Pete Wernick, Charles Sawtelle and Mike Scap. Nick Forster soon replaced Scap on bass, with Sawtelle moving to guitar, and the band took its name from the secret ingredient in Martha White flour. Their first album, Hot Rize (1979), included O’Brien’s newly written “Nellie Kane,” and Radio Boogie (1981), Traditional Ties (1986), Untold Stories (1987) and Take It Home (1990) followed. Partway through a show the four would walk off, change clothes and come back as Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers, a comic honky-tonk band, with O’Brien in the title role. In 1990 Hot Rize became the IBMA’s first Entertainer of the Year, and that same year O’Brien left to go solo. The band has reunited since, with Bryan Sutton on guitar from 2002 after Sawtelle’s death, and released When I’m Free in 2014.

His songwriting was by then reaching country radio. Kathy Mattea took “Walk the Way the Wind Blows” and “Untold Stories,” both bluegrass hits for Hot Rize, to No. 10 and No. 4 on the Billboard country chart, and their duet “The Battle Hymn of Love” reached No. 9 in 1990. RCA signed him, but dropped him after he recorded Odd Man In, which Sugar Hill released in 1991. With Mollie he made Take Me Back (1988), Remember Me (1992) and Away Out on the Mountain (1994), the last of which included two early Gillian Welch songs, “Orphan Girl” and “Wichita,” and from 1991 to 1998 he led Tim O’Brien and the O’Boys.

Red on Blonde (1996) set Bob Dylan songs in a bluegrass frame, and The Crossing (1999) joined Irish and Appalachian music. He moved to Nashville in 1996 and in 1998 started his own label, Howdy Skies. Other artists kept recording his songs: Garth Brooks cut “When There’s No One Around,” written with Darrell Scott, on Sevens (1997), Nickel Creek recorded “When You Come Back Down” (2000), and the Dixie Chicks recorded “More Love” (2002). With Scott he made Real Time (2000), a live album in 2012 and Memories and Moments (2013), and around the turn of the century he also played with Steve Earle’s Bluegrass Dukes and the group NewGrange.

In 2005 he released two albums at once, the more intimate and traditional Fiddler’s Green and the funkier Cornbread Nation. Fiddler’s Green won the 2006 Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album, and that year the IBMA named him Male Vocalist of the Year, as it had in 1993, and gave him its Song of the Year award. In 2010 he toured with Mark Knopfler. He played mandolin and sang on The Earls of Leicester (2014), Jerry Douglas’s Flatt & Scruggs project, which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album in 2015.

His later solo albums include Chicken & Egg (2010), Where the River Meets the Road (2017), He Walked On (2021) and Cup of Sugar (2023). Since 2015 he has performed with his wife, Jan Fabricius, and their duo album Paper Flowers (2025) grew out of co-writing sessions with Tom Paxton. He was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2013 and, as a member of Hot Rize, into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame in 2022 and the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2025.