Amanda Cook

She grew up in the Florida Panhandle, where her father, the banjo player Mike Blanton, took her to bluegrass festivals; for years she played flute in the school marching band and kept her singing mostly to herself. In 2007, in her mid-twenties, she joined her father in forming a band, High Cotton, which played a very traditional style of bluegrass. She taught herself mandolin and then upright bass for it, learned to sing harmony, and worked from records such as the Bluegrass Album Band’s, which her father handed her to learn.

In 2013 she started the Amanda Cook Band, with Carolyne Van Lierop on banjo from the beginning. Deep Water (2017), her first album for Mountain Fever, brought her songs onto bluegrass radio, and Point of No Return followed in 2019 with three songs she co-wrote, among them “Standing ’Cross the River” and “Sarah, Dear,” both with Thomm Jutz. Narrowing the Gap (2021), her third Mountain Fever album, included “Get On Board,” “West Virginia Coal,” written by her bandmates Troy Boone and Carolyne Van Lierop-Boone, and “Lonesome Leaving Train,” which she had begun more than a decade earlier and finished with Jutz.

In 2018 Mountain Fever’s Mark Hodges offered her a place as a sound engineer in training, and in 2019 she moved to Virginia to engineer and produce for the label full time; her first project as engineer was an album by the North Carolina band Sweet Potato Pie. She was promoted to chief operating officer in 2022. Changes, the band’s fourth studio album, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard bluegrass albums chart in October 2022, and Restless Soul followed in October 2024. On July 7, 2024, the band made its Grand Ole Opry debut, with Van Lierop-Boone, Troy Boone on mandolin, Josh Faul on bass, George Mason on fiddle and Brady Wallen on guitar, and that year she was chosen for the IBMA’s Leadership Bluegrass program.