Troy Boone

He grew up in a musical family in Erwin, playing banjo and guitar, until in high school his brother gave him an F-style mandolin, which became his main instrument. He went on to the Bluegrass, Old Time and Country Music Studies program at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, where in 2016 he was playing in its top student band, the Bluegrass Pride Band. In May 2015 he released an album of his own, First Impressions, on Valley Beautiful Music; its ten tracks include “Rock Creek,” “Ole Slew Foot” and “Dreamcatcher.”

At the end of 2016 Sideline hired him as its mandolin player and singer in place of Brian Aldridge, and he began with the band in January 2017, commuting to shows from Tennessee while he kept up his studies. On Front and Center (Mountain Home, April 2018) he sang Josh Manning’s “Thunder Dan,” the album’s opening track, which reached No. 1 on the bluegrass airplay chart that spring and was named Song of the Year at the 2019 IBMA awards. He also played on Breaks to the Edge (Mountain Home, 2020), which includes “Roll On Blues.” He left Sideline at the end of the summer of 2019 to concentrate on school and family, and Zack Arnold took his place.

After filling in for several months with Amanda Cook, whose banjo player, Carolyne VanLierop-Boone, is his wife, he joined her band full time in January 2020, on mandolin and resonator guitar and singing harmony, with Frosty Foster on guitar. He was also finishing a degree in audio production at Full Sail University and recording bands in his home studio in North Carolina. Boone and Foster had begun playing together at the Ole Smoky Moonshine distillery in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, as Dreamcatcher, and in June 2020 Mountain Fever Records signed them as Boone & Foster to record the songs their audiences asked for most, with Daniel Greeson on fiddle, Brady Wallen on banjo and Aaron Ramsey on bass. The first single, “County Fool,” came out that June. Foster died on 10 February 2021, before the album was finished, and Boone completed the mixing and mastering; “I’ve Never Been So Lonesome,” with Boone singing lead, was issued in Foster’s memory in November 2022, and Smoky Mountain Favorites, with “Tiny Broken Heart” and the Stanley Brothers’ “Think of What You’ve Done,” followed on 21 April 2023. He was still playing mandolin with the Amanda Cook Band in 2025.