Sierra Hull grew up in the smallest county in Tennessee, learning how to play music at only 8 years old. KVNF Music Director, Dre Castillo, sits in conversation with Hull as she talks about her family, what it means to stay rooted in tradition and community while still evolving as an artist, and why Colorado audiences are so special in her words.
Sierra Hull will be performing at Telluride Bluegrass Festival on the Main Stage, Sunday, June 21st at 3:30 PM
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Dre Castillo: "I want to start in Byrdstown, Tennessee. For people who've never been, could you paint me a picture of what the place looks and feels like?"
Sierra Hull: "I was born and raised in Byrdstown, which is a very, very rural part of Tennessee. There's about 700 people in the town, 5,000 people in the county. It's the smallest county in Tennessee, so everybody kind of knows everybody. A lot of the folks I went to kindergarten with, I graduated with. My graduating class was the only public high school in the county at the time. I graduated with 44 people. So you can imagine, it's pretty quaint!
My folks still live there. It's a beautiful place to grow up. That part of Tennessee is a lot of rolling hills. There's also Dale Hollow Lake which is right there, so some folks may know Birdstown for that, but otherwise you almost need to have a reason to go. Some people go to fish and enjoy the lake, otherwise, it's kind of like a little diamond in the rough that a lot of people don't know about."
Castillo: "Coming from such a small place, and the way that your career trajectory has gone, it's probably been kind of insane."
Hull: "Yeah, it's kind of wild. I mean, it's all I ever wanted to do. I've pretty much known that I wanted to do all this since I was about eight years old when I started playing. It's crazy to reflect back on that and think about how, at that age — now it seems like, wow that's so young. How could I have known that? But there's always been that pull and I don't know if it's just the spiritual pull of playing music. With all the things in my life that have been absolutely gray, and you're trying to navigate and figure things out as you grow and all that. The idea of feeling called to play music and do this has always been there. There's never been a question about whether I wanted to do this, even when it's been hard. So whatever that is, I'm just so grateful that I've always been able to carry that with me.
So part of me still stops and goes, 'wow, pinch me, I can't believe I'm getting to do this.' But there's also a part of me that always knew I would do this, because it was all I could do. So it's an interesting dynamic in that way, not because I thought 'Oh, I'm so talented or whatever when I felt that pull eventually. I could barely play, you know what I mean? It wasn't a talent or skill thing or even a sense of recognition. It was more like: I love this. This is what I'm meant to do."
Castillo: "So at eight years old, what was your earliest memory of hearing this music and feeling something shift in you?"
Hull: "Well, in that part of the world, because it's so rural there is a certain amount of like, you're a little bit behind the rest of the world in some ways. It's a slower pace which can be a beautiful thing but it also means that people like my granny, her mama, and her mother before her weren't super educated in terms of school or going to college. So my generation of my family was really the first to go on and fly on an airplane, travel the world, go to college, things like that.
For the most part, though, a lot of my family, they've been in that part of the world, and you just don't really leave. And, again, that can be a really beautiful thing, too, because the idea of home is built into the place, not just the people, but the place. And I think music kind of plays a big part of that because it's a way of life. It's a way that somebody like my granny and her brother and sisters could like sit around and pass the time. It was something to do. It was a way to experience music in a spiritual sense too, music through church.
Like I didn't have people in my family that were trying to be on a stage. They weren't dreaming of doing what I'm doing. That's for sure. I think like they couldn't have even imagined doing something like that, but everybody sang. The idea of hearing guitars and mandolins and banjos and fiddles wasn't a foreign thing where I'm from. You could hear that pretty easily just because that's what people did as their hobby and loved doing it. So I grew up right next door to my granny's older sister, my Aunt Betty, and she married a man, my Uncle Junior, who played fiddle and mandolin and guitar a little bit. And so he was a preacher. Music was in church, that kind of thing. So he would play guitar while my Aunt Betty would sing. So with that 'trickle down' kind of effect, my mom grew up singing.
She always had a real natural sense of singing harmony, because you just kind of learn to do it just by being around it. My dad didn't grow up being around music in the same way my mom did, but he he's the one that really loves it the most. So funny enough, he's the reason that I really started getting into Bluegrass, because he bought a mandolin, he started getting interested in playing guitar and wanted to go to the local bluegrass jams and stuff like that.
So yeah, there is a certain amount of it just being part of your environment. And I don't know, it just been a really natural thing. So I can't tell you the first time that I really heard it. You know what I mean?
Like it was around before I really thought much about it. I always sang, but I think it was really when I got my own instrument, and I started learning to play my first few things on the instrument that the idea of being a musician kind of clicked. The singing, the playing, the community, you know. I fell in love with the community that I found, which a lot of times was people much older than me. They may be anywhere from 40 to 70 and I'm this random little eight year old kid, but they welcomed me. I fell in love with that. Those people became my dearest friends. And I couldn't wait till Friday and Saturday nights to get to go jam with my buddies, you know?"
Castillo: "Could you tell me a little bit more about your grandma and Spitfire and talk about that song and her?"
Hull: "Yeah, that granny passed away a few years ago now. She was just this bold, beautiful woman, definitely a huge part of my life. And I wanted to write this song, because I have this voice memo of her talking, and she was a big storyteller.
So I mean, she would be able to paint the most vivid picture of something that happened. Like I can't remember hardly sometimes what happened to me last week, you know? But she could remember stuff that happened in like 1950, and make you feel like you were there.
So she was just like going on and on one day at my Aunt Betty's house, her older sister who I grew up next to that she was over visiting. And we were all sitting around and my mom was up there too. And it was just us four ladies, and I thought, 'Wow, you kind of got these three generations of women sitting here and talking about life.'
And granny was just telling all these stories. And I said, 'do you mind if I just record some of this? Because I know someday I'm going to wish that I had this.' She was talking about different stuff in her life. So I've got like an hour and a half of her just talking about what it was like when she was a teenager or what it was like when she was the age I am now and different chapters of her life. And she lived through some really hard, tragic times and some stuff where you think, how could you go on? How could you even be the woman you are now?
It makes me a little emotional. I miss her every day. She is she was such a tough lady and so I wrote the song about her: Spitfire"
Castillo: "A lot of people describe your music as boundary pushing and progressive, but you're also deeply rooted in this bluegrass tradition. Do you think of yourself as someone who's pulling the genre forward? Or does that frame miss something for you?"
Hull: "Funny enough, I don't really think of myself in any way other than just somebody who loves music and is a curious musician. I think if you're a curious musician who's passionate about stuff, and you try to keep the door open for whatever kind of inspiration might want to creep in, there's something inevitable that happens just through living and learning. But I talk about my foundation and my roots being so deeply ingrained in the bluegrass community.
It's a beautiful thing to grow up so rooted in something like that, because the things that you learn from it are priceless. It's like almost immeasurable as a musician, because it's like you go and you learn a catalog of music, you learn how to sing a thousand choruses to these songs. You've learned like hundreds of fiddle tunes. And if I met somebody who grew up right here in California, even though I grew up in Tennessee, we could get together and play, and we've never met before, but we'd know so many of the same songs.
So there's something really beautiful about that connection to a style of music that has a repertoire that people think of, and they know, and they cherish. While at the same time, bluegrass gives you this skill set of being able to improvise. So what that does is it teaches you a skill set after many, many years of being ingrained in a type of genre and community like that.
So I always go, I'm really just a Bluegrasser at heart. That's what my foundation is. But I love a lot of things as a listener. I love all kinds of music. So I try to just be very open to what I can take and learn from anyone and everything."
Castillo: "You've talked so much about the Bluegrass community and your family and how that keeps you going. I'm curious to know how you bring that to a live audience, and what does that give you?"
Hull: "The audience really is such a big part of what the show experience ends up becoming, and every crowd personality is different. You're trying to connect, and that can be different. Just like when you meet somebody, you and I may connect differently than you and someone else that you can talk to, and your conversation may be slightly different, even if you're telling a similar story about yourself. You may express that slightly different, or someone may bring something different out of you in conversation that another person wouldn't, and I think audiences are like that.
I know we're sort of talking about Telluride, but Telluride is an awesome example of despite it being, in some ways, a tough environment physically, because you're at altitude and the instruments are dried out and things are a little bit challenging. You may have your hero sitting in the front row, and there's a lot to consider when you go to Telluride. But the fans are some of the greatest music fans in the world.
You know that they're going to be, talk about open. It's like they're some of the most well-rounded, seemingly, music fans that you could possibly go play for. But the Colorado fans are such a perfect link between really listening, being quiet in the moments, and being really fun and outgoing and applauding and cheering in all the moments too; to make you feel something on stage. But I think the Colorado fans are such a perfect blend of listening, but also being really exciting to play for.
And that does bring something different out of you as an artist, I think, when you can actually feel the connection that way."
Castillo: "What do you want someone to walk away feeling after they see your set at Telluride Bluegrass?"
Hull: "I really hope that people can find that moment of just joy in what we do. You know, I was thinking about that because we went to, (we had an off day in San Diego,) and we went to the Padres game. And you look around and like, you're seeing the camera and you're seeing everybody and people just look so happy to be there and just having fun.
And I thought, you know, this is what music and sports are really meant to do, is to give us a little bit of an escape for a minute from the world and maybe make us question at times, too, and reflect on our deeper selves.
But also, you come to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, I think the hope is that somebody's going to feel like they can leave their troubles at the front gate and walk in and just have a joyful, almost like cleansing experience over the weekend. And so I would hope that we could help contribute to that because I know there's a lot of people who are having hard times out there and need that."