Sierra Hull

Musician · b. 1991 · Byrdstown, Tennessee · Also a recording artist
Best known for Mandolin Lead Vocals Songwriter

Sierra Hull is the mandolin player who turned a child-prodigy start into one of the most searching careers in contemporary acoustic music. She came up inside bluegrass — Opry stages at ten, a Rounder contract at thirteen — and then spent her adult career pulling the instrument somewhere else entirely, into odd meters, jazz harmony and songwriting that has more in common with the art-pop she grew into than with the Monroe tradition she grew out of. She is the first woman ever named Mandolin Player of the Year by the IBMA, and she has now won it seven times.

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  • Born September 27, 1991, in Byrdstown, Tennessee, a small town near the Kentucky line, she picked up the mandolin at eight and was playing professionally within a couple of years.
  • She made her Grand Ole Opry debut at ten, and returned at eleven to play the Opry alongside Alison Krauss — her hero, and later a mentor and recording partner.
  • Rounder Records signed her at thirteen, an almost unheard-of age for the label, and released four studio albums over the next seventeen years: Secrets (2008), Daybreak (2011), Weighted Mind (2016) and 25 Trips (2020).
  • She attended the Berklee College of Music on a presidential scholarship, the first bluegrass musician to receive one.
  • Weighted Mind was the turn: a spare, largely duo record made with Béla Fleck producing and Ethan Jodziewicz on bass, it dropped the band format entirely and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album.
  • A Tip Toe High Wire (2025) was her first fully independent release after leaving Rounder, and drew four Grammy nominations at once — Best Bluegrass Album, Best Americana Performance, Best American Roots Song and Best Instrumental Composition — bringing her career total to six.
  • Seven times the IBMA’s Mandolin Player of the Year, she was the first woman to win the award in any instrumental category, breaking a line of winners that had run unbroken through Monroe’s descendants.
  • Gibson built her a signature mandolin, making her the first woman in the company’s history to have one.
  • She is a member of the First Ladies of Bluegrass, the all-woman group of IBMA instrumental winners assembled with Alison Brown, Missy Raines, Becky Buller and Molly Tuttle.
  • Her playing turns up across the modern acoustic field: Dan Tyminski’s 20-20 Vision, Alison Brown’s Steam Powered Aereo Plane, Josh Williams’s Girl from the Canyon and Louisa Branscomb’s Steel Rails all carry her, as does her own River of Jordan.
  • Away from bluegrass she has recorded and toured with Béla Fleck, Dolly Parton, Brandi Carlile and Billy Strings, and played Carnegie Hall, the Opry and the White House.
  • She sings as well as she plays — a light, unforced soprano that she writes for deliberately, keeping the melodies conversational while the mandolin does the acrobatics underneath.

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