Bill Griffin

Bill Griffin is widely known as a musician in both bluegrass and Hawaiian music genres. A luthier and veteran mandolinist, he is also the inventor of the "mandolele", which is a nylon-stringed mandolin that he first crafted in 1986. Griffin was a member of the long-running California bluegrass band, the Cache Valley Drifters, from their inception in 1972 until they disbanded in 2015. He worked with the folk singer/songwriter Kate Wolf as an instrumentalist, arranger, and producer. In 1986 Griffin and Wolf (posthumously) won the Folk Album of the Year award from the National Association of Independent Record Distributors for Wolf's album "Poet's Heart."