Tim O'Brien is one of the spearheads of contemporary bluegrass. As co-founder and lead vocalist of
Hot Rize (and their comic alter ego
Red Knuckles & the Trailblazers),
O'Brien served as a bridge between the traditional sounds of the hill country and the modern styles of bluegrass in the 1980s. Since the band's breakup,
O'Brien has continued to expand the music's borders as a soloist, a duo partner with his sister
Mollie, and with his band, the O'Boys.
O'Brien's songs have additionally been recorded by
Kathy Mattea,
the Seldom Scene,
New Grass Revival, and
the Johnson Mountain Boys. The guitarist's deft picking has set a standard for the instrument's role in bluegrass, and in the 2010s he expanded his boundaries by forming the Tim O'Brien Band with a handful of respected acoustic instrumentalists.
O'Brien's earliest memories of music are the
Benny Goodman and
Glenn Miller records favored by his parents and the
Lawrence Welk recordings played by a Polish housekeeper. A turning point came when
O'Brien began listening to a weekly country music radio show, The Saturday Night Jamboree. Discovering that the show was broadcast from a local theater,
O'Brien became a frequent audience member and saw performances by
Jerry Lee Lewis,
Buck Owens,
Merle Haggard, and
Roger Miller.
Acquiring his first guitar at the age of 12,
O'Brien took to the instrument almost immediately. Although he played with numerous high-school rock bands,
O'Brien was steered toward country music and bluegrass by Roger Bland, a banjo-playing patient of a girlfriend's psychiatrist father. A former member of
Lester Flatt's band,
Bland taught
O'Brien to play in the three-finger style of
Earl Scruggs.
O'Brien had earlier discovered that his father had played mandolin banjo in college, and although his father no longer played the instrument,
O'Brien bought new strings and learned a few rudimentary techniques. While attending Colby College in Maine,
O'Brien began to play mandolin.
Leaving college after a year,
O'Brien headed to Wyoming and then to Colorado. Before long, he hooked up temporarily with a jug band, Ophelia's String Band. Meeting future
Hot Rize bandmates
Pete Wernick and
Charles Sawtelle,
O'Brien formed a bluegrass band, the Drifting Ramblers.
Nick Forster, a guitar repairman at the Denver Folklore Center, soon joined the group as well. The band, however, soon drifted apart with
O'Brien and
Wernick going on to record solo albums. Assembling a new group to help promote the solo recordings,
O'Brien,
Wernick,
Sawtelle, and Forster launched
Hot Rize. The band remained together for 12 years. Although their initial sound was very traditional,
Hot Rize continued to evolve in a more progressive direction. A popular highlight of
Hot Rize's performances came when the four musicians left the stage, changed their clothes, and re-emerged as the Western honky tonk group
Red Knuckles & the Trailblazers. The gag continued to grow with the offshoot band recording several albums on their own.
In addition to his work with those aforementioned bands,
O'Brien joined his sister,
Mollie, to record an album of old-timey country songs: 1988's
Take Me Back. The two have since collaborated on several other albums. While performing at the Summerlights Festival in Nashville, he also met country music songstress
Kathy Mattea. When
Mattea subsequently had hits with her covers of his songs "Untold Stories" and "Walk the Way the Wind Blows,"
O'Brien announced that he was leaving
Hot Rize to seek his fortunes as a songwriter.
Although
O'Brien initially signed as a solo performer with RCA, the contract was doomed, and the label turned down
O'Brien's first album attempt before dropping him from their roster. He went on to sign with bluegrass label Sugar Hill. The O'Boys were formed to help promote
O'Brien's solo album,
Odd Man In, in 1991. Although Forster was an original member, he left the group to host the National Public Radio show E-Town and was replaced by
Scott Nygaard.
O'Brien continued releasing solo material through the '90s and into the following decade, including an album of
Bob Dylan covers (
Red on Blonde), the Grammy-winning
Fiddler's Green, and the intimate, stripped-down
Chameleon. He expanded his audience with each record, and by the 2010s he was a fixture on Billboard's bluegrass chart. In 2012, he teamed up with
Darrell Scott for a live duet album called We're Usually a Lot Better Than This, which received a sequel called Memories & Moments in 2013.
O'Brien returned to solo recordings in 2015 with
Pompadour, his first record for Howdy Skies. He followed this album with Where the River Meets the Road in 2017.
O'Brien next formed a fresh ensemble in which he was joined by bassist Mike Bub, fiddler Shad Cobb, banjo and guitar player Patrick Sauber, guitarist Bryan Sutton, and vocalist and mandolin player Jan Fabricius. He called the group the Tim O'Brien Band, and their self-titled debut album was issued by Howdy Skies Records in March 2019. ~ Craig Harris