Uncle Junior of Byrdstown, TN didn’t know what he was setting in motion, safe to say. He was just enthusiastically playing fiddle tunes and chopping away at a mandolin for fun like thousands of small-town, shade-tree pickers who love bluegrass and string band music. The thing is that the toddler from the house next door (his great niece) heard the vibrations, and even though he wasn’t a natural born prodigy, she would turn out to be. Her name was (and remains) Sierra Hull.
Sierra’s dad played music too, discovering bluegrass alongside his growing daughter, including local jams in a generally lively culture of traditional music there near the Kentucky border east of Nashville. She thought she wanted to play the fiddle first, but fate handed her a mandolin, and she got serious about it very fast. “Immediately from the time I was eight years old and picked up the mandolin, it was like, this is what I want to do with my life,” she said. “I knew immediately that's what I wanted for a career. I wanted my whole life to be about this.”
As a late bloomer myself, I find this all very disorienting, but Hull made the most of being so inspired at such a young age. At 10, she meets her hero and future mentor Alison Krauss and debuts on the Grand Ole Opry later that year. At 13, she signs a deal with her favorite label, Rounder Records. Her debut album Secrets comes out around the time she graduates high school. She attends Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship. Awards and accolades follow, including four IBMA Mandolin Player of the Year awards. She remains the only woman to win that category in its long history.
This story of Sierra Hull’s formative years was covered in detail during my first String interview with her in 2018 (Episode 46), but it was time for another visit, because so much has happened since. She’s collaborated widely, including the recording and touring of Béla Fleck’s Grammy Award-winning My Bluegrass Heart album. And she fulfilled her contract commitment with Rounder, setting her free to explore her options. After some thought, she’s gone fully indie, producing and releasing her newest collection A Tip Toe High Wire (coming March 7) on her own with a time-tested team.
“It's my first release in about five years. And in these past few years, I got to do a lot of my own music and exploring, but also I got to do a lot of really special collaborations. You know, I've learned a lot,” she says in Episode 313, which we captured on video at WMOT’s Riverside Revival studio. (It is posted below). The title, she says, “is a bit of a metaphor for stepping out in this new, slightly scary place but trying to be bold enough to do it. . . I wanted to make a record that had that progressive feeling, but also kind of leaned back into my roots a little bit, kind of stepping out and trying to present all the things I've learned over the last few years.”
I was fortunate to meet Sierra early in her journey - about 16 years old - when Rounder Records hired me to make a video promotional piece for her debut release. I got to see the houses next door to one another in a cozy, wooded part of Byrdstown (pop. 800) where she’d heard Uncle Junior’s music and where she’d drawn fantasy pictures of herself on Rounder album covers with her favorite artists. She showed me around her high school and took me to one of the community jams that helped her grow as a musician. And when she played solo on the front porch of her cute timber home, her mandolin artistry and technique were already obvious.
There are several broad schools of mandolin playing in bluegrass. The old school, exemplified these days by Mike Compton, digs into the strings with a muscular, scouring quality that Bill Monroe made his own at the dawn of bluegrass music. There’s a jazz-influenced mode that emphasizes groove and advanced harmonies in the manner of David Grisman or Sam Bush. And in the past 30 years, Chris Thile blazed a trail with a clean, nuanced approach that draws heavily from the tonal focus of classical music. Sierra Hull, while she’s able to draw from the whole history of the instrument, seems naturally inspired by the Thile way. Her technique is limber, quick and articulate, and her musical awareness is deep enough for the most advanced newgrass/jazz ideas.
The final polish on Hull’s mandolin and musical education came from her two years at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she was granted a full-ride scholarship and the flexibility to tour while taking classes. “I hadn't been prepping for years to go to Berklee. I was this little bluegrass kid who couldn't wait to get out of school and get to just go play shows,” she says in our latest conversation. “And so then it was too good of an opportunity - with the particular scholarship I got - to pass up. I was like, I have to at least go give this a try.”
She was there during the first years of the now well-known American Roots program, which was attracting some of the musicians that became her peer group and her current Nashville neighbors, folks like Molly Tuttle and banjo player Cory Walker. As for moving to Music City, which she did in the summer of 2011, she says that was in her plan as long as she could remember. Even then, she says, it felt like coming home. Further settling in, Sierra married multi-instrumentalist Justin Moses in 2017.
In the conversation presented here, we talk about assembling her exceptional band, about her producing partner Shani Gandhi, and about the vision behind the singles that were out at the time of this interview. “Boom” is a heart-settling song of renewal, co-written with Nashville craftsman Adam Wright. She made an unlikely pairing with soul country singer/songwriter Pat McLaughlin for the song “Come Out Of My Blues,” which she tells us she adapted to an entirely new melody and feel after it was “finished,” with Pat’s approval. “Spitfire,” which sourced the album’s title, is an ode to Hull’s grandmother, a country woman who suffered severe setbacks as a young person but who lived a rich life. And we also get an exclusive early listen to one of Hull’s new (and always enthralling) instrumentals.
Sierra Hull plays a release day concert in Nashville on March 7 at the Brooklyn Bowl. Tickets here.
