Jethro Burns Hiawatha Music Festival Performance

Jethro Burns was born in Conasauga, Tennessee on March 10, 1920. He was a highly-influential mandolin stylist, preferring clean single-note jazzy melodies and sophisticated chords over the dominant bluegrass stylings of Bill Monroe, and since he performed mostly in a country music setting, introduced many country mandolinists to sophisticated jazz harmonies and improvisational techniques, as well as standards from the songbooks of Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Cole Porter. Burns died in 1989 from prostate cancer in Evanston, Illinois.