LynnMarie

As the first female to be honored by the National Association of Recording Arts & Sciences with a GRAMMY nomination for "Best Polka Album", LynnMarie is a pioneer of modern polka music. The musical blending of her traditional Slovenian roots with country, folk and pop music - with a high-energy performance - has garnered her worldwide recognition as an established artist and a leading innovator of what is considered a new generation of polka.

LynnMarie was born and raised in the Cleveland suburb of Maples Heights, Ohio, and was destined to pick up an accordion. Her grandparents immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s from Slovenia, and her first introduction to the diatonic button accordion was watching her grandfather, Anton Miklaus, play his 1920s Mervar accordion. Singing and dancing as part of the Planina Junior Chorus would form the foundation of her musical career. Her father, Ludwig Hrovat, an accomplished accordion player and bandleader, was her first inspiration as a musician and as an entertainer.

At the age of 11, she took lessons from family friend Johnny Hrovat and by the age of 13, LynnMarie was singing and playing regularly at local clubs and festivals across the Midwest as a member of the Wolf Family Band. The group, consisting of her and her four teenaged cousins, traveled throughout Ohio bringing their infectious polka music to enthusiastic crowds. In the early 1970s, when the button box had a resurgence in the area due in part to legends like Lojze Slak and Frank Novak, LynnMarie could be seen competing at one of the many button box contests, or performing with local Cleveland favorites Joey Tomsick and Kathy Hlad.

During high school and college, LynnMarie’s attentions were focused on her theatre and television aspirations, but it was a trip to Slovenia in 1989 that would plunge her back into the polka music world. It was on this trip that the duo of “Joey T. & LynnMarie” was born. The duo recorded two albums together and was honored in 1990 by the National Cleveland-Style Polka Hall of Fame with the “Best Button Box” award. LynnMarie would receive the honor in 1992 as an individual.

In 1991, LynnMarie expounded on her musical roots by releasing an exercise video to polka music entitled Polkaerobics with LynnMarie. Using some of Cleveland’s best-known musicians, the video was the first to combine Cleveland-style polkas with exercise.

After the release of her first solo project in 1992, Coast to Coast, LynnMarie made the move to Nashville, Tennessee. Legendary guitarist Chet Atkins invited LynnMarie to perform with him, and encouraged her to take her ethnic roots music to a broader audience. Collaborating with different musicians and songwriters influenced not only her writing, but her playing and her vocal style as well.

In 1996, the American Slovenian Polka Foundation named her Euro-America’s Button Accordion Queen. During this time, LynnMarie was a special guest with many bands including Steve Meisner, Don Wojtila, and the Eddie Rodick Orchestra, and was a featured player with the GRAMMY-winning Jimmy Sturr Orchestra. Her first Nashville-produced album, One Look, contained the single, "That's What I Like About The North”, and it became the most requested song in the history of Cleveland’s WGAR Country Morning Radio Show in 1998.

LynnMarie has received five GRAMMY nominations: SqueezeBox (2000), The Polka Record (2002), LynnMarie + the Boxhounds (2003), Party Dress (2007), and Speechless (2009).

In 2006, she released her first European album, LynnMarie – America’s Polka Queen. She has performed live on the Grand Ole Opry, CNN, CMA Fan Fair, South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, and every major festival in between, bringing her high energy and unique polka style to audiences throughout the United States and Europe.

Her expertise as a diatonic button accordionist combined with her engaging stage presence has wowed fans, critics, and media alike. Jay Leno, host of The Tonight Show referred to LynnMarie as "the Dixie Chick of Polka”, and Rolling Stone Magazine said, “LynnMarie is one soulful polka diva!”

In 2012, she wrote and starred in Wrap Your Heart Around It, a musical dramedy based on her life experiences of growing up in an ethnic home and becoming the mother of a special needs child, and using her accordion to enhance this true-life story. It was produced by Emmy-winning director Paul Miller and performed in front of sold-out audiences in New York City and Los Angeles. The show was awarded “Best New Production” by the United Solo Theatre Festival in 2012. She followed up that success with a six-week run at the Falcon Theatre in Burbank, California, about which the LA Times said, “…LynnMarie’s unforced warmth and affecting candor amounts to a one-woman love bomb. [It has been a while since] Los Angeles witnessed so genuinely inspirational a personal memoir. I dare you not to wrap your heart around it.”

Following the success of the play, Post Hill Press published her memoir, also called Wrap Your Heart Around It. She blogs weekly about her life with her son and in 2016, one of her stories went viral, reaching 4.4 million people. She continues to book speaking engagements, sharing her story of hope, encouragement, and music, as a motivational entertainer and public speaker.

Throughout a career that spans over five decades, LynnMarie has performed and collaborated with many artists, including Willie Nelson, Flaco Jimenez, Dobie Gray, Riders In The Sky, and country music superstar Vince Gill. In 2018, she partnered in life and in music with one of Cleveland’s finest musicians, Eddie Rodick III, to begin yet another phase in her exciting and adventurous musical life story.

From the Slovenian Home in Maple Heights to the world stage, LynnMarie Hrovat has most definitely left her distinctive mark on the polka world.