Alison Krauss

With her silky vocals along with her warm personality and impressive ability as a fiddler Alison Krauss helped bring bluegrass into the mainstream with her music that adhered to the origins of the sound while appealing to the pop and country crowds. Her debut album, Too Late to Cry released in 1987, became a massive success. It wasn't her album of the same name, which was a platinum-selling one in 1995 called Now That I've Find You, that made her an international star. Between her 1987 release Too Late to Cry and Now That I've Find You her growth from being a child prodigy a versatile, ambitious, and varied musician. She also, as a result, produced some of the freshest bluegrass music of the late 1980s as well as the beginning of the 1990s. After that, through her performance on the soundtrack for the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Krauss became famous with a collaboration project called Raising Sand, which she recorded with Robert Plant (the two reunited for the recording of Raise the Roof 2021). Krauss took classical violin lessons at the age of five years old. Krauss soon grew tired of the regimen of classical playing and began performing bluegrass and country licks. At the age of eight, she started entering contests for talent in and around her hometown of Champaign, IL. After two years of this, she started her own group. When she was 12 years old, she won the Illinois State Fiddle Championship and the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass in America awarded her the best fiddler in the Midwest.