Michael Hedges (December 31, 1953 – December 2, 1997) was an American acoustic guitarist born in Sacramento, California, and raised in Enid, Oklahoma.

Hedges attended Phillips University in Enid, studying classical guitar. It was here that he studied under his compositional mentor, E. J. Ulrich. Subsequently Hedges was a Peabody Conservatory composition major who applied his classically trained musical background in combination with various unusual techniques to the steel-string acoustic guitar. He covered a wide range of musical styles and was considered an extremely dynamic performer in concert. He was discovered in the early eighties by William Ackerman who heard him performing in a Palo Alto cafe and immediately signed him to a recording contract on the Windham Hill label.

The first two records Michael Hedges made-Breakfast in the Field and Aerial Boundaries-were milestones for the acoustic guitar. He then branched out into singing and performing more popular forms of music, although he would periodically make a return to more guitar-centred music. He wrote nearly exclusively in alternate tunings. Some of the techniques he used include slap harmonics, use of right hand hammer-ons, use of the left hand for melodic or rhythmic hammer-ons and pull offs, percussive slapping on the guitar body, as well as unusual strummings. He also made extensive use of string dampening as employed in classical guitar, and was known to insist strongly on the precise duration of sounds and silences in his pieces. He also played guitar-variants like the harp guitar, and the Trans-Trem Guitar. He was a multi-instrumentalist, playing piano, percussion, tin whistle, harmonica, and flute, among others on his albums. Bassist Michael Manring contributed to nearly all of Michael’s records.

Michael Hedges was known for having a wonderful live acoustic sound. Hedges was able to precisely equalize his instruments for the concert hall in which he was performing. He used state-of-the-art equipment such as Sunrise soundhole pickups, F.R.A.P. and later, Trance Audio soundboard transducers.

In late 1997, Hedges died at the age of 43 in a car accident along State Route 128 in Mendocino County, near Boonville. According to his manager and longtime friend Hilleary Burgess, he was driving home from San Francisco International Airport after a Thanksgiving visit to his girlfriend in Long Island, New York. His car apparently skidded off a rain-slicked S-curve and down a 120-foot cliff. Hedges was thrown from his car and appeared to have died nearly instantly. It was a few days before his body was found. His record Oracle posthumously won the 1998 Grammy Award for Best New Age Album.

His unfinished last recordings were brought to completion in the album Torched, with the help of his former manager Hilleary Burgess and friends David Crosby and Graham Nash.