Unlikely fiddler’s dream
Born blind and mostly deaf, artist funnels what fiddle means to his story into album
Michael Cleveland had been 13 for five days the first time he picked with bluegrass demigod Doc Watson — in a backstage bathroom, no less, at an awards show in Kentucky.
It was September 1993. Peter Wernick, the first president of the International Bluegrass Music Association, had assembled a band of young hotshots to provide a pointed rebuttal to a Washington Post feature that argued kids didn’t care about antiquated mountain music. The teenage quintet electrified its audience, sprinting through a Bill Monroe standard with verve that suggested these sounds were vital to fresh generations.
After the triumphant ceremony, John Cleveland ushered his son — born blind, with one eye; almost deaf in his left ear and partly deaf in his right — to the bathroom. They found Watson, Wernick and a cadre of other genre giants laughing and jamming there, as if the lavatory were a back porch, and Michael joined for an hour.
“I had no shame, no fear, nothing,” Michael Cleveland, now 42, remembered with a hoot from the Indiana home he shares with his father. “I thought, ‘This may be the only opportunity I ever have to hear this person play, to be near them.’
That was pretty much all I wanted to do — raw, highenergy bluegrass.”
The teenager didn’t consider how Watson, who had lost his eyesight seven decades earlier at age 1, was the counterargument he needed: Teachers had warned Cleveland for years that career prospects for a blind bluegrass fiddler were grim, but he played on.
In the three decades since, Cleveland has become a bluegrass star himself, winning 29 IBMA awards and becoming
the organization’s most decorated fiddler. He is one of the world’s most indemand and distinctive players, with collaborators that include Bela Fleck, Billy Strings and Vince
Gill. “He plays with such ferocity,” Gill said. “But the amount of emotion he pulls out of that instrument is way more appealing than the amount of notes.”
Cleveland has only just begun to funnel his full story into records, documenting the hardships and joys of a difficult life devoted to bluegrass. Alternately woebegone and hopeful, his star-studded “Lovin’ of the Game,” now available, is an ecstatic document of what the fiddle has meant to his story — and what he hopes to mean to its history.
“For a long time, Michael didn’t want to talk about being blind. He never wanted to be the little blind
boy that played fiddle, for people to like his music because he was handicapped,” his father said. “He’s past that, and I’m glad — he might open up this music for somebody, to inspire them.”
Cleveland was a boyhood bluegrass zealot, not a prodigy. When he was 6 weeks old, his parents began toting him to bimonthly Saturday concerts his grandparents hosted at an American Legion in Henryville, Indiana. As a toddler, he became so obsessed with the staple “Rocky Top” that his parents drove him to Tennessee to meet the couple who had written it.
Still, Cleveland couldn’t play. A nearby fiddler struggled to show his first blind student how to hold the bow or the instrument. Teachers at the Kentucky School for the Blind fared better with a contraption
that kept the bow at the proper position, but they were more interested in the Suzuki method and classical music than Flatt & Scruggs. “On the first day, they asked me what I knew about violin,” said Cleveland, who replied, “‘Well, I don’t know much about the violin,’ I said, ‘but I know a lot about the fiddle.’ ”
Those first few years remained a struggle. One night, Cleveland dreamed about playing “Soldier’s Joy,” a mirthful fiddle number about payday he’d heard countless times. When he reached for his instrument the next morning, the tune was there.
Although he balked at his first fiddle contest, he kept trying, even joining Monroe, the bluegrass fountainhead, onstage at age 9. Soon after, he made his Grand Ole Opry debut with Alison Krauss. But it wasn’t Cleveland’s back story that people found compelling.
“You can feel his timing and pulse so well, like the drive of a banjo player,” multi-instrumentalist Sam Bush said in an interview, listing Cleveland as one of perhaps three bluegrass fiddlers ever to have that quality. (The others? Benny Martin and Paul Warren.) “Then he adds finesse, and he will surprise you.”
As Cleveland’s fiddle prowess ballooned, the rest of his life deflated. Although the young musician felt welcome and encouraged in bluegrass, he understood he was different. By 12, he had endured 30 separate surgeries to correct a cleft palate and lip, to insert a prosthetic eye and to reroute a blood vessel in his brain. He suffered serial bouts of spinal meningitis, and his eardrums were permanently perforated. His parents were then in the middle of an acrimonious divorce that would alienate him from his mother for decades.
Cleveland forwent college, hitting the road soon after his high school graduation in 1999, and emerged as an exciting sideman, passionate about bluegrass’s history and quick-witted, too. He made several solo records and assembled a band, Flamekeeper. The group kindled unapologetic traditionalism, its intensity making it a fast favorite within staunch bluegrass circles.
But six years ago, Cleveland considered how bluegrass crowds were aging and shrinking, and how he might do well to adapt. His subsequent album, “Tall Fiddler” from 2019, flirted with spirited jazz and hardscrabble balladry, and even dipped into rockabilly.
“Lovin’ of the Game” reinforces that openness. There’s a playful romp about high-stakes love alongside Strings, and a country lamentation for small-town settling with Charlie Starr of Blackberry Smoke. The most vulnerable moment in Cleveland’s catalog comes with “Temperance Reel,” a centuries-old tune updated with lyrics about a musician struggling with alcoholism, as Cleveland did for many years. His strings sing with unbridled joy, as if animated by possibility.
He’s now focused on what’s next. He tracks fiddle parts for most anyone who asks; his father will often hear him alone in the basement, playing for 10 hours at a time, dabbling in pop and jazz. And, at Fleck’s request, he is even learning some Bach for their first duo record.
“Bach’s Violin Sonata
No. 3 in C major,” Cleveland said with a sigh, chuckling at the irony of how being the best bluegrass fiddler brought him back to the classical violin he’d quit. “I know just enough to be dangerous. But yeah, I thought, I can do that.”