If you had come across Sierra Ferrell busking on a New Orleans street corner around a decade ago and said she would win four Grammys in 2025, no one - let alone her - would have believed you.
But that fairy-tale came true on February 2 when the 36-year-old singer-songwriter swept all four Americana/Roots categories in which she was nominated at the 67th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. She won Best American Roots Performance for "Lighthouse"; Best Americana Performance for "American Dreaming"; Best Americana Album for Trail of Flowers, and she and co-writer Melody Walker collected Best American Roots Song for "American Dreaming."
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The grand slam was indeed no surprise for an artist who has had a phenomenal 12 months. She dominated the Americana Music Awards in September when she was named Artist of the Year and won Americana Album of the Year for Trail of Flowers, an album Rolling Stone listed at number one on its 30 Best Country and Americana Albums of 2024.
All this by someone who was raised by a solo mother in a trailer park in West Virginia.
And her journey to stardom in Nashville took the long-way round. In her twenties, with guitar in hand, she led a nomadic, drug-addled lifestyle, playing in boxcars, truck-stops and street-corners from the Seattle to the Louisiana Bayou.
Now all the big names across the various genres – from Post Malone to Billy Strings and Raul Malo to The Travelin’ McCourys – are queuing up to work with Ferrell. Not surprising really, given that her musical profile gets listed as incorporating bluegrass, folk, old-time and jazz through to tango and calypso. No wonder the keeper of multi-genre music - the Americana Music Association – voted her Artist of the Year.
And the wide-spread appeal of Trail of Flowers is also testament to the musical versatility of the multi-instrumentalist. For the album debuted on top of Billboard’s more obscure listings -the Emerging Artists, Heatseekers and Tastemakers charts – while performing high across the more established classifications like Country Albums, Americana Albums and Billboard Artist 100.
Ferrell enhanced her reputation of a true utility-artist by releasing an alternate version of “Lighthouse,” perhaps the most beautiful of the 12 tracks on Trail of Flowers. The alternate was just Ferrell and her acoustic guitar, stripping the fiddle, mandolin, bass and backing vocals from the original.
Trail of Flowers was her second release for Rounder Records, with which she signed a three-album deal in 2019. And two years later, the first - the more Latin-influenced Long Time Coming – was released. Each album featured 12 tracks, most of them either Ferrell compositions or co-writes.
But, in fact, there were two earlier albums, Pretty Magic Spell (2018) and Washington by the Sea (2019), which were self-released by Ferrell and sold during her busking days. And it was in this period that she cut a single “In Dreams” which, when posted on YouTube, scored millions of views. Rounder would wisely include it on Long Time Coming.
Signing with a major label was all Ferrell needed to clean up her life. The street corner days were over. She was soon mixing it with the established acts in Nashville, like Old Crow Medicine Show, Margo Price and the Black Keys. Her song-writing blossomed too. And she started collaborating with the likes of bluegrass fiddler Nate Leath and, more recently, Melody Walker, a multi-instrumentalist who was also a co-writer on Molly Tuttle’s Grammy-winning albums Crooked Tree and City of Gold.
The success of Trail of Flowers prompted Rounder to cash in. Two days before the Grammys, it released a Deluxe Edition of the album which, along with “stunning packaging” featured two previously unreleased bonus tracks, “The Garden” and “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down.” In fact, “The Garden “ – the Deluxe single - was first released in 2023 on the sound-track of the dystopian-action movie The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. It was a co-write between Ferrell and Nashville-based multi-instrumentalist Oliver Bates Craven.
Ferrell has a simple philosophy to song-writing. “I’m just trying to put words and melodies together and build it into something people can pour their feelings, all their happiness and sorrows, so that it changes their reality a little bit and gives them some comfort,” she said. “To me music is like medicine. Whenever I write a song and it feels healing to me, I know it can heal other people too.”
It certainly healed the Grammy judges.
Grammy Winners – Americana/Roots
Best American Roots Performance
“Lighthouse” – Sierra Ferrell
Best Americana Performance
“American Dreaming” – Sierra Ferrell
Best American Roots Song
“American Dreaming” – Sierra Ferrell (writers Sierra Ferrell and Melody Walker)
Best Americana Album
Trail of Flowers – Sierra Ferrell
Best Bluegrass Album
Live Vol. 1 – Billy Strings
Best Traditional Blues Album
Swingin’ Live at the Church in Tulsa – The Taj Mahal Sextet
Best Contemporary Blues Album
Mileage – Ruthie Foster
Best Folk Album
Woodland – Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
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