In this paper, a new approach to free vibration analysis of a cracked cantilever beam is proposed. By considering the effect of opening and closing the crack during the beam vibration,it is modeled as a fatigue crack. Also, local stiffness changes at the crack location are considered to be a nonlinear amplitude-dependent function and it is assumed that during one half a cycle,the frequencies and mode shapes of the beam vary continuously with time. In addition, by using the experimental tests, it is shown that the local stiffness at the crack location varies continuously between the two extreme values corresponding to the fully closed and the fully open cases of the crack. Then, by using the mechanical energy balance the dynamic response of the cracked beam is obtained at every time instant. The results show that for a specific crack depth, by approaching the crack location to the fixed end of the beam, more reduction in the fundamental frequency occurs. Furthermore, for a specific crack location, the fundamental frequency diminishes and the nonlinearity of the system increases by increasing the crack depth. In order to validate the results,the variations of the fundamental frequency ratio against the crack location are compared with experimental results.