The Woman Leading The Fiddle Revival In Country Music
It's common practice for chart-topping Nashville songwriters to see their accomplishments celebrated with lawn signs in front of industry offices, but Jenee Fleenor arrived at Sound Emporium Studios for her NPR interview to see a banner congratulating her on a different kind of milestone. This November, she became not only the first woman to win the Country Music Association's Musician of the Year award, but the first fiddle player to be honored in more than two decades.
Her journey started in the late 1980s in small-town Arkansas. Back then, Fleenor was a 3-year-old classical violin student studying the rigorous Suzuki method. Her father picked up the instrument, too, and learned right alongside her, while her mother accompanied them on piano. But when their daughter was 5, Bob Wills' western swing classic "Faded Love" transformed her into a fiddler.
"I'd heard it so much
