Sue Draheim (/ˈdrɔːhaɪm/ ^ⓘ DRAW-hyme; August 17, 1949 – April 11, 2013) was an American fiddler, boasting a more than forty year musical career in the US and the UK. Growing up in North Oakland, Draheim began her first private violin lessons at age eleven, having started public school violin instruction at age eight while attending North Oakland's Peralta Elementary School. She also attended Claremont Jr. High, and graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1967.

Originally trained as a classical violinist, Draheim became involved in many other genres and recorded albums with groups representing Cajun, Old Time, country, Zydeco, folk jazz, Irish and British folk music. Early on in her career, Celtic fiddle became Draheim's major focus.

While Draheim was primarily a fiddler, she never lost touch with her classical training, and was a member of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and the Bay Area Women's Philharmonic as well as UC Berkeley's University Chamber Chorus; Draheim, along with fiddler Kerry Parker, also "augmented" the harp trio "Trillium". She also played in the US premiere of Frank Zappa's experimental orchestral piece A Zappa Affair. She was described by Gael Alcock, cellist/composer with whom she performed one of Alcock's pieces, as "fiddler extraordinaire".

In the late 1960s, Draheim moved to a North Oakland house well known in the Bay Area music community and called simply "Colby Street". This move proved to be a decisive one in terms of her musical career as it was where she changed from a "violinist" into a "fiddler". In writing her short biography in 1970 to accompany the album notes for Berkeley Farms, Draheim gives us some background on that transition:

I've lived around the Bay Area most of my life. There wasn't much money at home. I had to talk my parents into letting me take fiddle lessons. I started that when I was eight years old. This was public school instruction. After three years of that, I began private lessons. I stopped when I was fourteen, and didn't touch the violin until I was 19. I moved to Colby Street when I was eighteen years old. It was there that I met Jim Bamford. He taught me my first fiddle tunes (as opposed to the classical violin music I'd learned). This was in 1967.

Draheim quickly got involved in American mountain string band music, forming a group called the "Diesel Duck Revue" in 1967 with Mac Benford, Hank Bradley, Sue Rosenberg, and Rick Shubb, performing with them at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage in 1968.

At about the same time she started playing with a Colby Street group that, when she performed with them at the Sky River Rock Festival (Tenino, Washington in 1968 and 1969), called themselves "Dr. Humbead's New Tranquility String Band and Medicine Show". The band consisted of Sue Draheim, Jim Bamford, Mac Benford, and Will Spires and owed its name to their manager and sound man Earl Crabb (aka "The Great Humbead"); by the time Mike Seeger arranged for them to be recorded for the Folkways Berkeley Farms album in 1970, they'd shortened the charming but cumbersome name to simply "The New Tranquility String Band". Performing with the band, her photograph appeared on the poster for the 1968 Berkeley Folk Music Festival. Draheim and Dr. Humbead's New Tranquility String Band also appeared at the 1969 Third Annual San Diego State Folk Festival; links to recordings of their performance there are provided on folkartsrarerecords.com's website.

Colby Street housed other groups as well, one of them being the "Golden Toad", featuring mandolinist and guitarist Will Spires; she joined them for the summer solstice concert at Grace Cathedral in 1970. In 1970, Joe Cooley, Irish button accordion player who was living in San Francisco at the time, visited the Colby Street house and that was the beginning of Draheim's lifelong attachment to Irish music. She and others joined Cooley to perform Saturday nights at San Francisco's long-standing Irish pub, the Harrington Bar, making up the band which they called "Gráinneog Céilidh." Years later, Draheim's command of the Irish folk music idiom as well as her versatility in other genres would prompt one fan to comment: "And that is a very apt illustration of the point: Sue Draheim, a classically-trained violinist who has been mistaken for a real-deal Sligo fiddler who nowadays has a chair in a San Francisco symphony orchestra as well as playing in old timey bands".