Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley

Their paths first crossed when Hensley was a boy. Born in Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1990 and raised in nearby Telford, he sang in a gospel group from the age of six and took up the guitar after hearing Charlie Waller and Jimmy Martin at a bluegrass festival. At eleven he made his first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, playing with Earl Scruggs and Marty Stuart, and when Scruggs played Knoxville soon afterward he had the boy sit in; Ickes was then the Dobro player in Scruggs’s band. Hensley went on to make bluegrass albums with his band Drivin’ Force, the first of them, First Time Out (2003), produced by Tom T. Hall, and two self-released country albums.

About a decade after that Knoxville show Ickes heard him again. Hensley moved to Nashville in 2013, and the two began playing regularly at the Station Inn, which Ickes treated as a showcase for the younger man. Compass Records announced their signing in October 2014, and Before the Sun Goes Down came out on 13 January 2015, produced by the duo with Ron Block, Mike Bub, Andy Leftwich, Aubrey Haynie and Dan Tyminski among the players and singers. Its mix of bluegrass and traditional country ran from “Pride and Joy” to “Little Cabin Home on the Hill,” and it was nominated for Best Bluegrass Album at the Grammys in February 2016. Late in 2015 Ickes left Blue Highway, and from 2016 the duo was his main work.

The Country Blues (Compass, 2016), co-produced by Hensley and again recorded largely live, had Vince Gill, Carl Jackson, Jon Randall Stewart and Shawn Lane as guest singers; it included the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” and “One Way Out.” The same year the two shared the IBMA’s Instrumental Recorded Performance of the Year for “Fireball,” with the Special Consensus and Alison Brown, and in 2017 they shared its Recorded Event of the Year for Bobby Osborne’s “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” from his Compass album Original.

For World Full of Blues, released on 4 October 2019, they worked with the producer Brent Maher at his Nashville studio, the Blueroom, recording live with Hammond organ and a horn section added. The two wrote or co-wrote nine of its songs; Taj Mahal sang on the title track and Vince Gill on the Grateful Dead’s “Brown-Eyed Women.” Maher produced Living in a Song as well, released on 10 February 2023: twelve songs leaning toward classic country, five of them written by the duo with Maher, and a “Way Downtown” modeled on Doc Watson’s version on Will the Circle Be Unbroken, with Stuart Duncan on fiddle.

They played the Grand Ole Opry and festivals including Telluride, RockyGrass, Wintergrass and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and they collaborated with Taj Mahal; their playing with him on Swingin’ Live at the Church in Tulsa, credited to the Taj Mahal Sextet, won the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album in February 2025. In July 2025 they announced that the duo would stop touring at the end of the year, with Ickes cutting back on the road and Hensley starting a solo career.