T Bone Burnett Biography

T Bone Burnett is a Grammy and Oscar winning songwriter and music producer, most famous for his work with the Coen brothers and with Jeff Bridges in the 2009 movie Crazy Heart.

He grew up in Fort Worth and began playing in bands and recording songs in 1965. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and got his first big break in 1975 as a guitarist for the Bob Dylan‘s Rolling Stone Thunder Revue tour.

Burnett co-founded The Alpha Band, made three records, then went solo in 1980 with Truth Decay.

He wrote and recorded several critically-acclaimed albums up through 1992’s The Criminal Under My Own Hat, but never became a household name.

Burnett’s skills in the recording studio and his knowledge of American music history have since made him a sought-after producer and movie soundtrack expert.

Burnett has won Grammys working with Tony Bennett and K. D. Lang on 2002’s A Wonderful World, with Alison Krauss and Robert Plant on 2007’s Raising Sand and with B.B. King on 2008’s One Kind Favor.

After helping the Coen’s choose songs for The Big Lebowski (1998), he worked with them on 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? and had great success, winning five more Grammys and kicking off a renewed interest in bluegrass music.

Since then he’s done major tours, released two career retrospectives (2006’s The True False Identity and Twenty Twenty), got an Oscar nomination for his song “The Scarlet Tide” (for 2004’s Cold Mountain) and an Oscar win for the song “The Weary Kind” (in Crazy Heart).

He’s also scored several television shows, including True Detective (2014), Mr. Mercedes (2017) and Harrow (2019).