Mark O'Connor

Mark O'Connor (born August 5, 1961) is an American fiddle player, composer, guitarist, and mandolinist whose music combines bluegrass, country, jazz and classical.

A three-time Grammy Award winner, he has won six Country Music Association Musician Of The Year awards and was a member of three influential musical ensembles: the David Grisman Quintet, The Dregs, and Strength in Numbers.

O'Connor has released 45 albums, of mostly original music, over a 45-year career.

He has recorded and performed mostly his original American Classical music for decades.

An expert at traditionally-based fiddle and bluegrass music, he also plays other instruments proficiently, including the violin, guitar and mandolin.

He has appeared on 450 albums, composed nine concertos and has put together groundbreaking ensembles.

His mentors have included Benny Thomasson who taught O'Connor to fiddle as a teenager, French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli with whom O'Connor toured as a teenager, and guitarists Chet Atkins, Doc Watson and Steve Morse.

O'Connor was born and raised in the suburb of Mountlake Terrace, Washington, where his father was a construction worker and his mother was a dance teacher.

His mother insisted that he learn to play the guitar at the age of five and, by the age of ten had taught himself to play the Flamenco guitar.

As an eight-year-old in 1969, O'Connor watched fiddle player Doug Kershaw perform the song "Diggy Liggy Lo" on The Johnny Cash Show, leaving such an impression on him that he begged his parents to purchase him a fiddle for the next three years before they finally gave him one for his eleventh birthday.

In 1973, O'Connor's mother drove him and his little sister from Seattle to Nashville, Tennessee, where a local friend suggested that he might be allowed to play at the Picking Parlour.

His performance at the Picking Parlour left the local audience stunned that a twelve-year-old knew so many old-time fiddle songs.

A couple of days later, he made his Grand Ole Opry debut, introduced by Roy Acuff, and became the youngest musician to sign a recording contract with Rounder Records.

O'Connor won national titles on the fiddle, guitar, and mandolin as a teenager.

In 1975, at the age of thirteen, O'Connor won the WSM (AM), Tennessee, and Grand Ole Opry sponsored Grand Masters Fiddle Championships in Nashville, Tennessee, against amateur and professional competitors of all ages.

That same year he won another national championship on acoustic guitar, at the National Flat Pick Guitar Championship in Winfield, Kansas.

After graduating from the Mountlake Terrace High School in 1979, O'Connor joined the David Grisman Quintet as the replacement for guitar player, Tony Rice, and went out on tour with Stephane Grappelli with whom he performed at Carnegie Hall when he was only seventeen-years-old.

As a teenager, he was also a member of the seminal instrumental group The Dregs, previously known as Dixie Dregs.

At age 19, He won the Buck White International Mandolin Championship in Kerrville, Texas.

He is a four-time grand champion (1979, 1980, 1981 and 1984) at the National Oldtime Fiddlers' Contest in Weiser, Idaho.

Several of his teenage albums are noteworthy and inspired a generation of young acoustic musicians, such as "Pickin' In The Wind", "A Texas Jam Session", "Markology" and "False Dawn".

O'Connor composes, arranges, and records American music in genres that include folk, classical, and jazz.

His works include concertos, and compositions for orchestra, string quartets, string trios, choral music, solo unaccompanied pieces, folk and bluegrass ensemble and a symphony (see Compositions).

After releasing six albums as a teen on Rounder Records, O'Connor signed a long term record deal with Warner Bros. Records in Nashville.

He released a series of instrumental albums such as "Elysian Forest" and "On The Mark" as well as teaming up with Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and Edgar Meyer for "Strength In Numbers".

His first award winning albums that catapulted him into the international stage include "New Nashville Cats" and "Heroes" both released on Warner Bros.

"American Seasons", and his "Strings & Threads" Suite (1986) was performed by The Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra in 2001 at the Great Performers concert at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

In a review by The New York Times, "if Dvorak had spent his American leisure time in Nashville instead of Spillville, Iowa, his New World Symphony might have sounded like this."

O'Connor's "Fiddle Concerto (1992)", a violin concerto in American fiddle style commission by the Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, has been performed over 250 times, making it one of the most performed concertos written in the last 50 years.

The recording of the concerto was conducted by Marin Alsop and "Concordia Orchestra".

In 1993, O'Connor teamed up with Charlie Daniels to record a sequel to Daniels' 1979 single "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" entitled "The Devil Comes Back To Georgia".

O'Connor and Daniels recorded the song alongside Johnny Cash, Marty Stuart and Travis Tritt.

The song was on O'Connor's album, Heroes.

Between 1995 and 2000, O'Connor teamed up with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer to release "Appalachia Waltz" and "Appalachian Journey" spending nearly 2 years at the top of the classical music Billboard charts.

In 1996, O'Connor composed The Olympic Reel for the closing ceremonies of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.

It premiered in front of 100,000 people at Centennial Olympic Stadium, as well as 3.5 billion people from the television viewing audience.

In 1997, O'Connor and others composed and performed music based on folk melodies as arrangements for the American Revolutionary War-era Public Broadcasting Service documentary miniseries, Liberty! The American Revolution (the companion album is Liberty!).

The theme music for the miniseries is O'Connor's Song of the Liberty Bell.

In 1999, he recorded his Fanfare For The Volunteer with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for Sony Classical, and one of his most critically acclaimed orchestral pieces American Seasons, which alludes to The Four Seasons (Vivaldi), for Sony Classical as well.

Both "Strings & Threads" Suite and "American Seasons" were recorded for the album The American Seasons, released in 2001 on the label OMAC Records.