At the 2024 30A Songwriters Festival, Jason English sat down with Amanda Donald, a musician who weaves bluegrass, gospel, and country threads with the practiced hand of a deep-South storyteller. Rooted in her Mobile, Alabama upbringing, Donald channels heritage through her fiddle and voice, keeping old sounds alive with a modern, inquisitive spark.

Donald’s debut album, 100 Roots, released in August 2023, is anchored by a title track inspired by a haunting piece of 19th-century history. Encouraged by her sister Katrina, Donald researched a story from 1835 involving a man in Mobile convicted of murder. Before his execution, he claimed an oak tree would grow from his grave to prove his innocence; today, that tree is a local landmark. Donald captured this legend in a "story song" that mirrors the eerie vibe of classics like "Long Black Veil".

The conversation shifted to the complexities of attraction, sparked by Donald’s song "Red Flags". Growing up on the Gulf Coast, she used the literal red flags on beaches—warning swimmers of dangerous rip currents—as a metaphor for relationship warnings that people often choose to ignore. On the mystery of chemistry, Donald noted:

She argues for a "balance" between the two, hoping that when people commit, there is a functional "mixture of your heart and brain".

Donald is a self-taught songwriter who found her best rhythm while working as a first-grade teacher, where daily exercises in rhyming kept her lyrical brain sharp. A true multi-instrumentalist, she began on the mandolin at age eight, moved to guitar at twelve, and became "obsessed" with the fiddle by sixteen. Her proactive nature even led her to cold-email her hero, Ron Block of Alison Krauss & Union Station, who eventually played banjo on her record.