Daniels, whose hits include the Grammy Award-winning Southern rock classic "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," will be honored for his "enduring influence on generations of music makers." He joins a distinguished list of BMI Icons that includes country songwriter/artists Loretta Lynn, Bill Anderson and Dolly Parton; legendary musicians Brian Wilson, Carlos Santana and Paul Simon; r&b legends James Brown, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Isaac Hayes and Al Green; blues/rock/soul artist Van Morrison, Motown songwriting trio Holland-Dozier-Holland; and funk/r&b group Charlie Wilson and The Gap Band.

Skilled on guitar, fiddle and mandolin, the Wilmington, North Carolina-native moved to Nashville in 1969 to find work as a session guitarist. He contributed to recordings for artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Al Kooper, Flatt and Scruggs, Ringo Starr, Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins. Some of his many hits as a recording artist include "Uneasy Rider," "Long Haired Country Boy" and "The South's Gonna Do It Again," which won a BMI Country Award in 1976.

His signature song, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," which has more than three million broadcast performances, earned Daniels a BMI Pop Award in 1979 and a BMI Country Award in 1980. The platinum-selling single also topped both the country and pop charts, won a Best Country Vocal Performance Grammy, earned three Country Music Association Awards, propelled his Million Mile Reflections album to triple platinum status, and became the cornerstone of the soundtrack to the hit movie Urban Cowboy.

Other BMI Country Award winning songs in Daniels' catalog include "Wichita Jail" (1977), "Mississippi" (1980), "Drinkin' My Baby Goodbye" (1987) and "In America" (1981), which also earned a Pop Award in 1980.

The New York-born, Nashville-based Fleck, named after classical composer Béla Bartok, became fascinated with the banjo in his teens, switching from guitar after hearing Flatt and Scruggs' Beverly Hillbillies theme. After studying at New York's High School of Music and Art, he won acclaim at a young age in the bluegrass world, while exploring the instrument's potential for jazz improvisation.

After stints with the Boston group Tasty Licks and the Kentucky band Spectrum, Fleck joined the influential progressive-bluegrass quartet New Grass Revival in 1982 and remained with the group until it split up the end of the decade. When the opportunity to assemble his own combo arose in 1989, he launched the Flecktones with bassist Victor Wooten, his electronic-percussionist brother Roy "Future Man" Wooten, and multi-instrumentalist Howard Levy; Levy was subsequently supplanted by saxophonist Jeff Coffin. Through a series of increasingly popular albums, the group's eponymous 1990 debut, Flight of the Cosmic Hippo, UFO-TOFU, Three Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Live Art, Fleck and company have forged a musical identity that's both distinctive and unpredictable, integrating a seemingly bottomless well of textures, styles and influences.

As they've continued to push stylistic boundaries, the Flecktones have won a large and devoted fan following drawn from all ends of the musical spectrum. They maintain a particularly strong constituency in the jam-band scene, thanks to the musicians' penchant for exotic improvisation.

"Sometimes when people credit Dave Matthews and Phish for our audience, we say 'Yeah, it's helping'," Fleck recently told Down Beat. "But what's really going on is years of playing a couple hundred gigs a year and building an audience from scratch and learning to please an audience so they'll want to come back. The more diverse the audience is, the better. If you've got people who would normally be jazz fans sitting in the same room with people who love bluegrass, some funk fans who love Victor [and] some Deadheads, it turns into this roomful of happy people who are all real different."

Despite the Flecktones' commercial success, the band's leader continues to branch out into a diverse array of projects in a variety of genres. The most recent Flecktones album, Outbound, is his first under a new Sony contract that calls for Fleck to also release classical and jazz projects. The musician's inclusive vision is reflected in the fact that Outbound augments the quartet with a dizzyingly diverse array of guest performers, including Shawn Colvin, Yes vocalist Jon Anderson, veteran avant-rock guitarist Adrian Belew, oboe player Paul McCandless, and keyboardist John Medeski of jazz jammers Medeski, Martin & Wood), Tuvan throat-singer Ondar and steel-pan drummer Andy Narell, as well as the tabla player and string quartet featured on the Flecktones' spirited reading of Aaron Copland's "Hoedown."

"The fact that we allow taping of our concerts has changed our approach to making records," Fleck recently explained to Sonicnet. "What's the incentive of buying a record of the same stuff without an audience to get the band excited? The point of the record is giving the audience something that they can't get live. And it's created an opportunity for us to go into the studio and explore."