The November 2025 top albums, songs and artists charts are based on 11,366 airplays reported on 373 playlists submitted by 99 different folk DJs. The number of reported spins is shown below in parentheses.

Folk Alliance International (folk.org) is a nonprofit organization that aims to serve, strengthen, and engage the global folk music community through preservation, presentation and promotion.

Editor’s Note: I would have posted the charts last week but was preoccupied with other important matters.

“In their artistic practices, the NEA National Heritage Fellows tell their own stories on their own terms. They pass their skills and knowledge to others through mentorship and teaching,” said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “These honorees are not only sustaining the cultural history of their art form and of their community, they are also enriching our nation as a whole.”

A sought-after musician, Cleveland, 41, has also performed with such noted artists as Vince Gill, J.D. Crowe and the New South, The Kruger Brothers, Tim O’Brien, Andy Statman, and Marty Stuart, among others. “He plays fearless and it’s intoxicating to play with him because he makes you play fearless,” says Gill. “He takes no prisoners but he plays with a restraint and a soul. He plays without abandon. It’s wicked to see how much he pulls out of a bow. He’s untouchable.”

Here’s a link to a recording of Michael Cleveland performing “Tall Fiddler”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcwx6AifG7Q.

A film celebrating the National Endowment for the Arts 2022 class of artists and tradition bearers premieres this fall on arts.gov, where more information on the NEA National Heritage Fellowship and a complete list of recipients can also be found.

According to a family post on his Facebook page: “Byron suffered a stroke in the cerebellum which affected his coordination and vision. He was making improvements with his eyes and coordination, and getting stronger. After a few weeks he began aspirating food into his lungs which led to increased invasive treatments which he couldn’t recover from. Eventually his lungs gave up and so did his heart.”

Berline, who was born in Kansas and lived in Oklahoma, started playing fiddle at the age of five, and played on the Dillards’ Pickin’ and Fiddlin’ album (1965) while still in college. Just after graduating from the University of Oklahoma, he had a short stint with Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys in 1967, before being drafted into the U.S. Army. During that time, Berline co-wrote “Gold Rush,” now a jam session standard, with Monroe.

Here’s a link to short video of Berline and Mark O’Connor playing “Gold Rush” during a workshop at the 2016 Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXpzsasGvBc

Berline won the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest Championship in 1965, 1967 and 1970. He recorded two albums with The Flying Burrito Brothers, whom he joined in 1971, and briefly worked with Stephen Stills’ band Manassas following the Burrito’s breakup. In early 1972, he helped to form the band Country Gazette before launching Byron Berline and Sundance with guitarist Dan Crary, banjoist John Hickman and others a few years later. Vince Gill later joined the band on mandolin, an instrument that Berline also played.

In 1981, Berline helped form the band Berline, Crary, and Hickman. After a few personnel changes, that band later became California and was named Instrumental Group of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) for three consecutive years (1992, 1993 and 1994).

Berline moved to Guthrie, Oklahoma (his wife’s hometown) in 1995, where he owned and operated the Double Stop Fiddle Shop & Music Hall until his death. Jam sessions there led to the formation of The Byron Berline Band that toured throughout the U.S. and Europe. Although the original shop and most of his prized instruments were destroyed in a fire in 2019, Berline opened another one across the street from it.

Over the years, Berline also created the annual Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival, released several solo albums, and recorded with such notable artists as Alabama, The Byrds, Mary Chapin Carpenter, John Denver, Joe Diffie, The Doobie Brothers, Bob Dylan, The Eagles, Mickey Gilley, Emmylou Harris, Janis Ian, Elton John, Willie Nelson, Earl Scruggs, Andy Statman, Rod Stewart, and Lucinda Williams. A number of film and television soundtracks have also featured his music. Berline was inducted into The National Fiddler Hall of Fame in 2013.

Here’s a link to a 2017 video of Byron Berline in the studios of The Oklahoman discussing how he got into music and learned to play, among other things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEmO3Lv39Ew

And here’s one of Berline performing in The Oklahoman’s studios:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2fu5MOcjvJY

Tickets for the tour – including dates in Nashville (April 18 and 19), New York City (April 29), Boston (May 1), Washington DC (May 3 and 4, sold out), Chicago (May 9) and Oakland, CA (May 19) – go on sale Feb. 7. Nickel Creek also is slated to perform during the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado, June 19-22. More tour dates may be added.

Here’s a link to a video of Nickel Creek performing “Destination” off its forthcoming album:

Nickel Creek was launched in 1989 by bluegrass child prodigies Chris Thile (mandolin and vocals), Sara Watkins (fiddle and vocals), both then eight, and Sara’s older brother Sean Watkins (guitar and vocals), who was 11 at the time. Thereafter, the band released five studio albums and one compilation recording — 2006’s Reasons Why (The Very Best) — and earned popular and critical acclaim. Time magazine dubbed the trio “music innovators for the new millennium” following the release of its self-titled debut album in 2000, while its 2002 follow-up, This Side, won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

Although the trio initially followed a bluegrass orientation, Nickel Creek evolved into an acoustic outfit with a wide array of musical influences — prompting USA Today to note “This acoustic trio moves farther and farther from anything Bill Monroe would have recognized as bluegrass.” Yet, Nickel Creek helped to stir renewed interest in bluegrass and acoustic music and appealed to millions of fans – including many young people.

Besides performing and recording as a band, Nickel Creek’s members also had been engaged in solo and other collaborative projects which they pursued even more during the trio’s seven-year hiatus. All three plan to continue to do so.

Chris Thile, a multi-instrumentalist and composer who delves in bluegrass as well as other musical genres – including folk, country, classical and jazz – was among 23 people in various fields who were awarded “Genius” grants last year from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in recognition of having “shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

Thile, who won the national mandolin championship at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas at the ripe old age of 12, released his first solo album of mostly original composition, Leading Off, the following year. In 1997, at age 16, he won both a Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album and an International Bluegrass Music Award for album of the Year for True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe. He later won an International Bluegrass Music Award for Mandolinist of the Year (2001).

Over the years, Thile has released a number of solo albums and also has teamed up with such notable artists as mandolin player and multi-instrumentalist Mike Marshall, bassist Edgar Meyer (whom he has cited as one of his biggest musical influences), and cellist Yo-Yo-Ma. He recorded a well-received, Grammy Award-winning album entitled The Goat Rodeo Sessions with Yo-Yo Ma, Meyer and noted fiddle player Stuart Duncan; duo albums with Meyer and with guitarist Michael Daves; and has appeared on albums by such artists as Diercks Bentley, The Dixie Chicks, Scottish songbird Julie Fowlis, Sarah Jarosz, Dolly Parton, and Kate Rusby. His latest musical collaboration, Punch Brothers, sprung out of the How to Grow a Band, which he formed in 2006 and which also is the title of an independent documentary film that portrays Thile as he leaves the very popular Nickel Creek and launches an artistically ambitious new band. The five-member Punch Brothers has toured extensively, has released three albums and an EP, and is featured on the official soundtrack recording for the Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis.

Sara Watkins, who has held an informal residency at the Los Angeles nightclub Largo, along with her brother Sean, actively pursued a solo career while Nickel Creek was on hiatus. Her self-titled debut album, produced by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, was released by Nonesuch Records in 2009.

In the span of three years between it and her sophomore release, Sun Midnight Sun, she toured internationally both as a solo artist and as a guest fiddle player and vocalist with The Decemberists. She also has performed with Works Progress Administration, did a short tour of England and Scotland in with Jerry Douglas and Aly Bain, opened for and played with Jackson Browne during his 2012 acoustic winter tour (Browne also appears on Sun Midnight Sun), and toured with Donavan Frankenreiter, Robert Earl Keen and Tift Merritt as well. She also joined Garrison Keillor on his nationwide Summer Love performance tours and guest-hosted for him on A Prairie Home Companion. Sara also has accompanied her brother on two of his three solo albums.

“The only way to catch up with and understand Bill Monroe’s own feeling that Kenny Baker is the ‘greatest fiddler in the world’ is to listen to Kenny’s playing – to his power, his control, his intonation and articulation, and most of all to his artistic intentions,” wrote Thomas Adler in the liner notes to Kenny Baker Country (1976), one of a dozen albums Baker recorded on the County Records label.

Widely regarded as a musician’s musician, Baker mentored and influenced other players with his smooth, long-bow fiddling style. “All your great fiddle players in Nashville, when they heard Kenny, they knew there was a lot more to be had with a fiddle, a lot more to learn,” Ronnie Eldridge, a close friend of Baker, told The Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky.

During his illustrious career, Baker also toured with Graves, Jesse McReynolds and Eddie & Martha Adcock as the Masters and recorded sessions with such notable artists as Jimmy Martin, The Osborne Brothers, Mark O’Connor, Mac Wiseman and Dry Branch Fire Squad (with whom his son, Johnny Baker, formerly played guitar and sang tenor).

Although Kenny Baker was the son and grandson of old-time fiddlers and picked up the fiddle as a youngster, he also played the guitar for a while, and played both it and the fiddle in Don Gibson’s country band from 1953 until he started his first stint with Bill Monroe in 1957. While he spent much of his working life as a coal miner (and playing at barn dances on weekends) and living in Kentucky, the bluegrass state, Bob Wills’ western swing and Stephane Grapelli’s jazz style appealed to Baker early on.

In addition to his fine musicianship, Baker is credited with writing or co-composing nearly 100 tunes. Among them are “Baker’s Breakdown,” “Big Sandy River,” “Farmyard Swing,” “Frost on the Pumpkin” and “Windy City Rag.” Baker received a National Heritage Fellowship from the national Endowment for the Arts in 1993 and was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1999.