Aaron “Frosty” Foster
Aaron “Frosty” Foster was a guitarist and singer from Wells Bridge, New York, who came to bluegrass through East Tennessee State University’s program and in his last years played lead guitar in the Amanda Cook Band and formed the duo Boone & Foster with the mandolinist Troy Boone. He died in February 2021, aged 28, before the duo’s album Smoky Mountain Favorites was finished.
He had his first music lessons from his father and grew up going to bluegrass festivals in and around New England with his grandparents. Their friendship with Eric Gibson of the Gibson Brothers led to his first guitar, a Christmas present when he was ten, and Gibson later appeared on several of Foster’s own recordings. He moved to east Tennessee to attend East Tennessee State University, and although he had not set out to study bluegrass, a few elective classes and the local and student jams changed his course. He spent two years in the university’s top student band, the Bluegrass Pride Band, and graduated in 2017 with an interdisciplinary studies degree and a minor in Bluegrass, Old Time and Country Music Studies.
In 2016 he released a solo single, Pam Tillis’s “Reaping the Blues,” and in November a solo album, Opening Doors, with Brandon Green on banjo and Adam Steffey on mandolin. It mixed bluegrass and gospel standards such as “More Pretty Girls Than One,” “Wayfaring Stranger” and “Somebody Touched Me” with “Pike County Breakdown,” a “Songbird” recorded with the Gibson Brothers, and a three-guitar “Temperance Reel” with Jeremy Fritts and Wyatt Rice. He later worked as public relations and marketing coordinator for ETSU’s Department of Appalachian Studies.
With Boone he played regularly at the Ole Smoky Moonshine distillery in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, where the two performed as Dreamcatcher. In 2019 he took the guitar job in the Amanda Cook Band, and he played on its Mountain Fever album Narrowing the Gap (April 2020) and on the singles “West Virginia Coal” and “Lonesome Leaving Train” that followed. In June 2020 Mountain Fever signed him and Boone as Boone & Foster to record the songs their audiences most often asked for, with Daniel Greeson on fiddle, Brady Wallen on banjo and Aaron Ramsey on bass; the first single, “County Fool,” reached No. 6 on the Bluegrass Today weekly airplay chart the week before he died.
He died at his home in Elizabethton, Tennessee, on 10 February 2021. Boone finished the album, and Mountain Fever issued “I’ve Never Been So Lonesome” in November 2022 and “Long Journey Home” in March 2023 before releasing Smoky Mountain Favorites on 21 April 2023, with Foster on guitar throughout, on songs from “Tiny Broken Heart” and “Uncle Pen” to “Rocky Top.”
