As she says, “I think I can speak for most of us that it can get a little old to sometimes feel like there is one slot on a festival lineup for ‘the female’ artist or band. She also pulled in the Mandolin Player of the Year at the 2016 IBMA awards, which is the first time the award has gone to a woman. Hull’s new album is an adventurous departure from her previous work in bluegrass, pushing more towards a kind of thoughtful or artful minimalism. I remember being about nine or 10 and thinking, ‘that will be me someday-a woman mandolin player!’” “I didn’t know anything about her music, yet, but I thought it was so cool to see a woman holding a mandolin on the album cover. I was nine years old when I got my first Alison Krauss recording and she really became a big hero to me.” Krauss ended up as a mentor for Hull at a young age, and Hull’s first album came out on Rounder Records when she was only 15 “I remember getting my first Rhonda Vincent album, too,” Hull continues. I think that was one of the reasons that I fell in love with Alison Krauss so early on. Growing up, she says, “I started playing bluegrass music at such an early age that it never really dawned on me that I was the only female around at times. Speaking at the IBMA conference, Marian Levy, a founding member of Rounder Records, called for change in the tradition, stating the Rounder Records rallying cry that “music doesn’t discriminate.” There’s still much work to be done, though, and these seven artists are at the forefront of the new wave of women smashing the bluegrass “grass ceiling.”Ĭoming out of the child prodigy world of bluegrass, mandolinist Sierra Hull released her first album at age 10. The International Bluegrass Music Association’s (IBMA) recent annual conference looked very different from past years: there was a showcase on diversity featuring artists of color (who are virtually non-existent in traditional bluegrass), as well as LGBT artists. But these artists also recognize that we’re on the cusp of change. Still, it’s not always an easy road, and the artists interviewed here recognize the struggle of women within a music genre that’s constantly looking to the past for authentication. Today, it’s not as hard to point to powerful women in bluegrass, from country star Alison Krauss (who has a new album coming this year), who got her start as a precocious bluegrass prodigy, to popular Americana artists like Sarah Jarosz or Sara Watkins, both of whom emerged in the bluegrass scene at young ages. But women have been a part of bluegrass from the beginning, first with Sally Ann Forrester on accordion in Bill Monroe’s first band, and later with pioneers like Louise Scruggs, Earl’s wife and a powerful businesswoman in the bluegrass music industry, or Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard, a duo most often quoted as paving the way for women in bluegrass. Certainly, the main foundational figures of bluegrass were all men-Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs, Lester Flatt, Jimmy Martin, Ralph Stanley. Bluegrass is often maligned either as one of the whitest American music genres, or one of the most male-dominated.

Female bagpipe player