Kristin Scott Benson

Her father played music, and her grandfather, Orval Hogan, played mandolin with the WBT Briarhoppers. She grew up in Boiling Springs, in a part of the South Carolina upstate with a long line of banjo players, and started on the mandolin at five. By ten she was drawn to the banjo, and she got one for Christmas at thirteen; and the banjo player and teacher Al Osteen became her mentor, teaching her, as she put it, to “think and listen.” She studied the playing of Earl Scruggs and Béla Fleck, among others, and first played the Grand Ole Opry at nineteen.

She went to Belmont University in Nashville, where she graduated summa cum laude in marketing with a minor in music business. In September 1995, at nineteen and in her sophomore year, she joined the Larry Stephenson Band, her first job in a busy touring band; she traveled with it for nearly five years while in college and is on its Pinecastle album On Fire (1998), produced by Sonny Osborne. A self-titled album, Kristin Scott, appeared in 1997. Her first instrumental album, Straight Paths (Pinecastle, 2002), was recorded in January 2002 at Riverside Audio in Mount Gilead, North Carolina, with Jim Hurst on guitar, Wayne Benson on mandolin, Jim VanCleve on fiddle and Mickey Harris on bass; four of its twelve instrumentals, including the title track, are hers, alongside pieces such as Bill Emerson’s “Home of the Red Fox” and the Delmore Brothers’ “Fireball Express.”

By 2006 she was playing with Larry Cordle & Lonesome Standard Time and had been offered a teaching post in the bluegrass program at East Tennessee State University, which she turned down when she was expecting her first child. In December 2006 she went back to the Larry Stephenson Band, on banjo and vocals. Her second album, Second Season (Pinecastle, October 2008), recorded at Digital Underground in Greenbrier, Tennessee, again mixed her own instrumentals, among them “Don’t Tread on Me,” nominated for an IBMA instrumental award, with pieces like “Sandy River Belle” and “Bugle Call Rag,” with Cody Kilby, David Grier, Wayne Benson, VanCleve and Shad Cobb among the players. She won her first IBMA Banjo Player of the Year award in 2008.

In November 2008 the Grascals announced that she would replace Aaron McDaris on banjo. With the band she has appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and CBS’s The Talk, played for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and made some two hundred Grand Ole Opry appearances. She was Banjo Player of the Year again in 2009, 2010 and 2011, the last in a tie, and in 2019, 2023, 2025 and 2026. In September 2018 she became the ninth winner of the Steve Martin Prize, which carries an unrestricted $50,000 award and a sculpture by Eric Fischl and is decided by a board including Martin, Anne Stringfield and players such as J.D. Crowe, Tony Trischka, Alison Brown and Béla Fleck. In 2020 South Carolina gave her a Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award.

Stringworks (Mountain Home, July 2016) has four of her instrumentals, opening with “Great Waterton,” nominated for the IBMA’s Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year, as well as vocal tracks sung by Claire Lynch, Chris Jones and Mickey Harris. She shared that IBMA award twice: in 2021 for “Ground Speed,” a version of the Earl Scruggs piece with Skip Cherryholmes, Jeremy Garrett, Kevin Kehrberg and Darren Nicholson, and in 2025 for “Ralph’s Banjo Special,” with Gena Britt and Alison Brown. With her husband, the IIIrd Tyme Out mandolin player Wayne Benson, she formed the duo Benson during the pandemic; after four singles, its first album, Pick Your Poison, came out on Mountain Home on 31 March 2023, with Kilby, VanCleve, Mickey Harris and Jamie Johnson among the guests. She also teaches, passing on the three-finger technique she learned from Osteen.