Mackenzie Bell

Photo by Arnold Flenor Mackenzie Bell is a 15-year-old fiddle player who was born in Guatemala, adopted at the age of seven months, and has grown up just 10 miles from Bill Monroe’s hometown of Rosine, Kentucky.  When she was 7-years-old she heard a friend play the fiddle and thought that this was something that she wanted to learn.  She said, “My friend, who lived nearby, was taught by his grandfather.   I heard him play and I told my parents that I wanted fiddle lessons. They thought that it might just be a childhood phase, so they said, ‘If you still want to play when you turn 8, then you can take lessons.’”  When she turned 8, Mackenzie was still interested and started taking lessons from Wendell Snodgrass of Morgantown, Kentucky.  Since then, her enthusiasm for playing the fiddle has never wavered.  She quickly progressed from playing simple melodies like “Twinkle Little Star” to performing fiddle tunes like “Liberty.”  By the time she wa