Tim O'Brien (born March 16, 1954) is an American country and bluegrass musician. In addition to singing, he plays guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, bouzouki and mandocello. He has released more than ten studio albums, in addition to charting a duet with Kathy Mattea entitled "The Battle Hymn of Love", a No. 9 hit on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks (now Hot Country Songs) charts in 1990. In November 2013 he was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame. Early life Tim O'Brien was born on March 16, 1954 and raised in Wheeling, West Virginia, the youngest in a family of five children. At the age of 12, he first heard a Bob Dylan record, played by his older sister Mollie, afterwards deciding to take up music. Throughout his teens, he taught himself to play guitar, violin, and mandolin. In high school, he and his sister Mollie, a singer, began performing Peter, Paul, and Mary songs as a duo at church and local coffeehouses. Music career Hot Rize In 1973, he dropped out of Colby College to pursue music professionally. He wrote to his mother at the time, saying, "I'm heading west. I know 200 songs now, and I figure if I keep learning more I should be all right." He eventually moved to Boulder, Colorado in the 1970s and became part of the music scene there. He played bars around Denver and Boulder with Dan Sadowsky and the Ophelia Swing Band and cut one of his earliest albums, Swing Tunes of the 30's and 40's, with that band in 1977. In Colorado, he met guitarist/bassist Charles Sawtelle, banjoist Pete Wernick, and guitarist Mike Scap, with whom he formed Hot Rize in 1978. Mike Scap was soon replaced by Nick Forster on bass with Sawtelle moving to guitar. Over the next twelve years, the quartet earned recognition as one of America's most innovative and entertaining bluegrass bands. Never straying too far from a traditional sound, Hot Rize stood out with fresh harmony singing, Wernick's melodic banjo playing, and O'Brien's easy-going rhythmic drive. To broaden their repertoire, the members of Hot Rize would often split their show with a set of classic and offbeat country and western music in the comic guise of Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers. The band would walk off stage, change clothes, and reappear as a different band (O'Brien assumed the mantle of "Red