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Wimberley sits in the Blanco River valley of the Texas Hill Country, small enough that everyone knows everyone, shimmery enough — Sarah Jarosz’s own word — that people who pass through on a Hill Country drive tend to remember it. It’s the kind of town that has one high school, one football team, and also, somehow, a Friday night bluegrass jam that changed a girl’s life.
Jarosz was born in 1991 and grew up here, the daughter of two Wimberley teachers. She started piano at age two. By ten she had picked up the mandolin and started showing up to the weekly bluegrass gatherings that brought musicians of all ages together in the community. Those jams taught her the language before she fully understood it — how to listen, how to trade solos, how to follow and lead. The community that gathered around the music became her first audience.
World on the Ground
By sixteen she was signing her first label deal with Sugar Hill Records. By graduation from Wimberley High School she had already performed at festivals across the country and shared stages with legends like Guy Clark and Tim O’Brien. She went to the New England Conservatory in Boston without stopping making records.
She moved to New York. She toured the world. She won four Grammy Awards. Then, somewhere in her years away, she looked back at Wimberley and saw it clearly for the first time. Her 2020 album World on the Ground is built from Wimberley’s specific textures — the Ford Escape her parents drove, the dusty trails behind their house, conversations at her tenth high school reunion about dreams deferred and lives still being figured out.
“It took leaving Wimberley and being away from it for quite a while to be in a place where I could actually write about it this way,” she said. The jam still happens. The Hill Country is still shimmery. Sarah Jarosz grew up here, and the whole world eventually found out.
