Brady Wallen
Brady Wallen is a banjo player and guitarist from Williamsburg, Kentucky, who came up through the bluegrass program at East Tennessee State University. He played banjo with the Clay Hess Band and on Boone & Foster’s Smoky Mountain Favorites, spent about three years as the guitarist in the Amanda Cook Band, and in August 2026 joined the Darren Nicholson Band on banjo.
While studying in ETSU’s Bluegrass, Old Time and Country Music Studies program he spent a semester in its honors band, the Bluegrass Pride Band, and in June 2017 he began touring with the Clay Hess Band on banjo. On the band’s Pinecastle album Just Another Story (July 2018), with Clay and Brennan Hess on guitars, Dustin Frame on mandolin and Irl Hees on bass, he played banjo and sang lead, tenor and baritone parts.
In 2020 he was the banjo player on the recordings Troy Boone and Aaron “Frosty” Foster made for Mountain Fever Records as Boone & Foster, with Daniel Greeson on fiddle and Aaron Ramsey on bass; after Foster’s death the label released “I’ve Never Been So Lonesome” in November 2022, with Wallen singing harmony, and the album Smoky Mountain Favorites on 21 April 2023.
He then took over the guitar in Amanda Cook’s band, the job Foster had held, and played on her Mountain Fever albums Changes (October 2022) and Restless Soul (October 2024), singing harmony with the banjo player Carolyne Van Lierop on the latter, along with singles such as “Mitchell Mullins” and “Goodbye.” He was with the band for its Grand Ole Opry debut on 7 July 2024. That October he left to pursue his own music, and Justin Alexander replaced him.
He has also played with the Burnett Sisters Band, in the Shedhouse Trio with the guitarist Avery Welter and the bassist Sarah Griffin, and with Michael Prewitt & Crunchgrass Supreme. In August 2026 Darren Nicholson named Wallen, on banjo, and Griffin, on bass, as full-time members of his touring band, alongside Welter.
