John Cowan Hartford (December 30 1937– June 4 2001) was an American bluegrass composer and musician known for his mastery of the fiddle and banjo, when well as for his witty lyrics & unique vocal style. Hartford performed using a kind of ensembles throughout his career, & is possibly better known for his solo performances in which he would interchange the guitar, banjo, & violin from either song to song. He too invented his have shuffle tap dancing move, & danced in the amplified piece of plyboard when he played & sang.

John Harford (he would vary his title to Hartford late within life at a behest of Chet Atkins) was born inside December 30, 1937 in New York City. He spent his childhood around St. Louis, MO in which he fell enamored using 2 items, music & a Mississippi River. He recorded additional than Thirty albums, & was a featured guest in numbers of others, including the Byrds Sweetheart of the Rodeo. He won the Grammy award in 1968 for his song "Gentle on My Mind", fallowing Glen Campbell's cover version became a hit. A ill fame & income that his hit provided allowed Hartford to forge his have path within music, leaving him to break unhampered the require to record hit when hit to trend lines his career. He won an additional Grammy inside 1976 for his album Mark Twang for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording.

Additional recently, Hartford performed on the soundtrack for the film, O Brother Where Art Thou? and hosted the survive performance of the film's soundtrack at a renowned Ryman Auditorium within Nashville, TN, equally seen on the docudrama "Down from the Mountain." His voice may be heard within Ken Burns' documentary Baseball.

Hartford was known to draw by using two his left & right hands...at the same time. He earned his steamboat pilot license & was renowned at a history of my lakes & boats. John Hartford yearn maintained the parallel being as a Mississippi riverboat pilot. Hartford grew higher inside St. Louis listening to stories & songs of the old steamboating times. His musical impulse come from either either seeing Flatt & Scruggs, a trend-setting bluegrass b& mass produced higher of previous Bluegrass Boys Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs, and from a old-olde worlde dances that were however existence held in the area when you took his youth in the Fifties. Hartford said typically that a foremost period he heard Earl Scruggs pick a banjo changed his life. He late moved to the West Coast, in which he became the regular in the Smothers Brothers tv program, & on to Nashville, in which he together the b& featuring Vassar Clements and Norman Blake that became the cutting edge of a "new traditionalist" movement on the united states scene. A album, "Steam-Powered Aereoplane" & its watch higher "Morning Bugle", blended traditional & contemporary styles around the unique way, & became what numbers of think to become his masterpieces. His Grammy-winning "Mark Twang" features Hartford around a solo setting, evocative of his survive solo performances swimming the violin, guitar, banjo, & amplified plyboard for tapping his feet. When you took his in the future years, he come back to the flow of any stream each summertime. "Working as a pilot is a labor of love," he said. "After a while, it becomes a metaphor for a whole lot of things, and I find for some mysterious reason that if I stay in touch with it, things seem to work out all right."

Along using his have compositions, Hartford was the voluminous repository of old flow of any stream songs, calls, & stories. He can spend hours talking just about a glory times of steamboating, or even demonstrate a lead calls that a flow of any stream's best known chronicler took when his title, "Mark Twain" (or even "two fathoms"). The masterly fiddler & banjo streaming video player, Hartford was at the same time an innovative voice on the united states scene & the thrilling reminder of the vanished era.

Hartford was besides andy skinner of "Steamboat in a Cornfield," a toddlers's book that recounts truth story of the Ohio Flow of any stream Steamboat The Virginia & its somewhat comic beaching inside a corn field. At a period of his dying, Hartford was too working on the life story of the unsighted fiddler Ed Haley. Hartford's album "Wild Hog in the Red Bush" occurs as collection of Haley's tunes.

He was the graduate of John Burroughs School in St. Louis, Missouri, and an honoree of that city's Walk of Fame. Hartford died from either non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in Nashville, Tennessee.