ROARING FORK BROADCASTING COMPANY
Thoreau very well could have written the aforementioned advice about bluegrass singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sierra Hull. She began the quest for a very big dream at the age of 8 and in three years of undeniable genius, powerful focus, a wealth of boldness and more than a sprinkle of magic, she achieved a goal that few people could ever imagine in a lifetime.
Hull will be in Aspen on Saturday for an 8 p.m. show at the Harris Concert Hall on the Aspen Meadows campus, a show presented through the Roaring Fork Sessions concert series. How she got to the Harris Concert Hall is beyond the stuff of legend. There may be no better example of a person going in the direction of her dreams and living the life she imagined more than 8-year-old Sierra Hull.
She grew up in a tiny Tennessee locale called Byrdstown (population 700).
“I always say music in that part of the world is more a way of life,” Hull said in an interview from The Fonda Theater in Olympia, California, where she is currently on tour. “Everybody played music in church, or at least sang. My aunt Betty lived next door and she married a man who played a little bit of mandolin and guitar, and every time I would go to their house as a kid, they were playing music. They had friends sitting in on the fiddle or the mandolin, so the idea of those instruments were familiar to me.”
Hull’s father bought a guitar and a mandolin and soon began to attend local jam sessions that would occur on the weekends in a town 30 miles away from Byrdstown.
When Hull was 8, her older brother Cody picked up the banjo. Wanting to be like her brother, she thought, “I want to play something too. And so my granny, my aunt Betty and uncle Junior went in together and bought me a fiddle for Christmas. They just found it at a flea market or something. It was a full-size fiddle. I stretched my arm out fully to the end of the fretboard and my arm wasn't long enough. It was pretty obvious I wasn’t going to be able to play that instrument.”
Hull soon discovered the mandolin as her instrument of choice.
“It was so magical,” she said. I just fell in love with it. She dove into learning the mandolin with ferociousness. She played almost every moment that she wasn’t at school. It wasn’t long before she joined her dad in the community jam sessions.
“I was lucky enough to have a community within 30 minutes where we would go play music on Friday and Saturday nights, and then at church on Sunday,” Hull said. My weekends were filled with music, from bluegrass to gospel.”
Hull plays down the idea that she was a child prodigy.
“I just was so into it. it's not an unusual story of a young musician who gets started and kind of dives in quickly,” she said. You can learn a lot in two years when you're really focused. Two years in the life of a child is like 20 years, at least it feels like it. There’s a rate of growth that happens so quickly.”
By the time Hull was 10 she had learned hundreds of songs. Learning how to play a song primarily involves memorization and dexterity, but improvising involves feel, instincts and anticipation. Her ability to improvise suggested a next level talent rarely seen by such a young person and warranted the prodigy tag.
“I could go to a jam and a lot of things that people would want to play, I had either learned or was in the process of learning,” Hull said. “I had started learning to improvise, which, of course, is a big part of the musical tradition of bluegrass. Maybe somebody plays a song you've never heard before, but you kind of know how to approach playing it, maybe even solo on it. I was just starting to get into that territory where it was like, ‘What does it mean to improvise and how do you approach that?’ because I had been learning so many tunes.”
People at the jam sessions and in the community encouraged Hull to make a CD. She went into a studio and brought in some of the musicians that she picked with on the weekends and recorded a CD called “Angel Mountain.”
And while having her own CD was a huge deal for a 10 year-old, it was the discovery of another CD that would set her life on a crash course toward her destiny.
It wasn’t even the music on the CD, it was the packaging. She was flipping through CDs at Walmart in the bluegrass section when she came upon one that didn’t look like any CD of a bluegrass artist she had ever seen. The artist was Alison Krauss.
“Packaging budgets were lower for bluegrass artists versus someone like Britney Spears,” Hull said. And there was just a certain aesthetic about this one CD. It had one of those sleeves that folded out. It just looked different to me. And I remember dad saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I think you'd really like this lady. She's awesome.’ So we bought it and when I played it, I loved it. I thought it was awesome. My dad was equally into it. So it was like this thing that we did together.”
From that moment on, Hull was obsessed. She said Krauss was her Michael Jordan. She spent hours learning the mandolin parts of the songs off the record. She prayed for her.
“It became my dream to get to play with her,” Hull said. “And of course, The Grand Ole Opry is where I dreamed of it happening. I used to draw pictures of me and her playing together at the Opry.”
Hull’s grandfather read in a magazine that Krauss was going to perform at MerleFest in North Carolina, so the family drove nine hours to the mountains to see her. The first night Hull joined a campfire jam session — perhaps the Super Bowl of campfire jam sessions happen at MerleFest. This one left people thinking, “Who is this 10-year-old from Tennessee?”
“When I walked into the festival, which is the biggest one I had ever been to, in my mind, I thought, ‘Oh, I'm definitely gonna get to meet her,’” she said. “No two ways about it, like, this is happening. My mom was like, ‘OK, honey, I don't want you to get your hopes up, because this is a big festival, and you might not get to meet her this time, but at least you'll get to see her play live.’”
One artist performing at MerleFest was Chris Thile, the mandolin player from Nickel Creek. Krauss had produced the band’s CD so Hull’s father purchased it for her. Hull was mesmerized by Thile’s mandolin playing and had spent hours trying to learn his parts.
A woman and her daughter walked up to Hull on the festival grounds and said, “Are you the girl from the campground last night?” Hull said she was and the woman said, “I was telling my daughter about you. Would you mind playing us a song?”
Having just seen Thile, she kneeled down and started to play one of Nickel Creek’s songs “Ode to a Butterfly.” Someone ran over and brought Thile out and when Hull looked up after she finished the song, he was standing there and said, “Do you want to play it together?”
The two found a quiet place and jammed for the next two hours. Hull explained to him that she loved his band, Nickel Creek, and had discovered them through Krauss — because she had produced it — and she told him she was her hero. Thile took Hull backstage where she met Krauss.
“I met her, but I didn't get to play with her," Hull said. “It was totally just a fan meeting. ‘Hi, I'm a fan of your music.’ She signed my little half-sized fiddle that I had gotten after we traded in the big fiddle. I was over the moon.”
Fast-forward to later that year. Hull was at an International Bluegrass Music Association event where she was playing the Little Pickers stage. At the event, she saw Ron Block, a member of Krauss’ band.
“My dad wasn’t the kind of person who would go up to somebody and say, ‘My daughter wants to meet you,’ she said. “He said to me, ‘There he is. If you want to talk to him you better do it or you’ll miss your chance.’ He always really pushed me to go up and say hello and tell somebody what their music has meant to me.”
Hull walked up to Block and explained that Krauss was her favorite artist and that she listened to all the band’s CDs and tried to learn the parts. The two jammed a little and after their session she pulled out a copy of her newly packaged CD “Angel Mountain,” and signed it with the words, “To my hero Alison Krauss,” and asked Block to give it to her.
Not too long after, Hull received a call from Krauss herself inviting her to play the Grand Ole Opry. Rarely does a person make a childhood dream come true when they are still a child. What she could only imagine as a kid’s fantasy only a few years earlier was manifested on Nov. 16, 2002, when Hull walked out onto the stage at the Grand Ole Opry and launched into a duet with Alison Krauss.
Krauss would go on to co-produce (with Ron Block) Hull’s Rounder Records debut “Secrets,” released when she was 16.
Hull is now 32. She has released five records, two of which have been nominated for a Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. She is the first woman to ever win the International Bluegrass Music Association award for Best Mandolin Player, which she has won six times.
She has collaborated with the biggest names in bluegrass and played at the most revered venues in the country. She will play at Red Rocks twice this summer, and she recently played at the White House. In a few weeks she will perform at Carnegie Hall.
Hull has moved confidently in the direction of her dreams since she first picked up the mandolin at the age of 8. And to this day, she continues to live the life she imagined. Perhaps Thoreau would have been proud.