Growing up in Wheeling, West Virginia in the 1950’s, Tim O’Brien was exposed to everything from country, to bluegrass, to the Beatles. He left his home as a teenager to go where many bluegrass musicians migrated: Colorado. It was there that he met the great Charles Sawtelle and other men with whom he formed the band, Hot Rize in 1978.

Over the next 12 years, the band became one of the most influential and entertaining bluegrass bands in the land. They kept the traditional sound of a bluegrass band, but added new and interesting harmonies. O’Brien’s vocals and playing of different country and western tuned with a touch of comedy in the tradition of Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers earned the band recognition as the Bluegrass Music Association’s first Entertainer of the Year in 1990, while in 1993, O’Brien himself was honored with the Association’s Male Vocalist of the Year honors.

In 1984, O’Brien moved on to a solo career that corresponded with the release of Hard Year Blues, a folk fusion that would be repeated throughout his career. His love of older country material and cowboy songs were revealed to the public with the release of three albums of material with his sister, Mollie O’Brien, doing the arrangement. She was the key element in the turning of “Walk the Way the Wind Blows” into a hit single, followed by “Untold Stories”. While both were originally Hot Rize songs, the new arrangements made them more appealing to a mainstream audience.

From there, he formed a band called the O’Boys with bluegrass guitarist Scott Nygaard and bassist Mark Schatz releasing 1993’s Oh Boy O’Boy and Red on Blonde, a cover of Bob Dylan classics.

Through the 1990’s, O’Brien developed relationships with many big names in the music industry including Garth Brooks with whom he and then partner, Darnell Scott, wrote “When No One’s Around”. He was a part of the collaboration with Dirk Powell and John Hermann writing songs inspired by the novel, Cold Mountain. In order to push his newgrass ideas in different directions he teamed up with a group of West Coast musicians Mike Marshall and Darol Anger to produce an album.

Later, in 1999 and 2001, he collaborated with some of the greatest Irish musicians at the time to create two collections of original and traditional songs. One the Crossing and Two Journeys explored the experiences of Irish-Americans and the Appalacian/Celtic musical dynamic that underlies so much of America’s traditional music.

It was the release of Cornbread Nation and Fiddler’s Green, originally slated to be a single CD, but because of the tremendous outpouring of material, became two, that O’Brien was able to express the full extent of his career. The CD’s cover everything from a single man playing guitar and singing to a full electric band playing a funkier beat. The CD’s park traditional songs next to classic country songs which, in turn, are placed next to rock and roll, but O’Brien considers this normal since, “It’s all the same in the end”. Music is really as simple as making something new out of something old.

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