A national fiddle champion at age 14, Seattle’s Mark O’Connor has maintained a frenetic pace as a composer and performer: a Nashville sessionman who played on more than 450 recordings during the 1980s ...

In the 1970s, when most kids were being lured by the siren strum of electric guitars, Mark O’Connor picked up a violin and, at age 11, began studying under Benny Thomasson, a Texas fiddler. O’Connor, ...

Mark O'Connor's story starts ordinarily enough. He grew up in a suburb of Seattle, where his father scraped by as a construction worker and his mother was a homemaker. But everything changed when he ...