Cory Walker

Musician
Best known for Banjo

Cory Walker is a Florida-raised banjo player based in Nashville who has played with Sierra Hull, Ricky Skaggs, the Dillards and Kix Brooks, among many others, and plays banjo in East Nash Grass, the IBMA’s New Artist of the Year for 2024. He won the IBMA Momentum Award for instrumentalist in 2014 and released his first solo album, School Project, in 2023.

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He grew up in a bluegrass family in Florida with a banjo-playing father, David Walker, and played in the Bluegrass Parlor Band with his brothers, Jarrod on mandolin and Tyler on guitar. By their teens he and Jarrod were drawing attention across the bluegrass world, and billed as Cory and Jarrod Walker they played the Grand Ole Opry many times. Jarrod later became the mandolin player for Billy Strings.

He played banjo on Sierra Hull’s Rounder albums Secrets (2008), alongside Tony Rice or Dan Tyminski on guitar, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and Barry Bales on bass, and Daybreak (2010), and he was a member of her band Highway 111. Besides Hull, Skaggs’s Kentucky Thunder and the Dillards, his credits as a sideman and session player include Mountain Heart, Missy Raines and New Hip, Claire Lynch, Tim O’Brien, Jim Lauderdale, the SteelDrivers, Kenny & Amanda Smith, the David Grier Band and Joe Diffie, and he appeared on network television with Keith Urban and with Earl Scruggs, Ricky Skaggs and Kix Brooks. In 2016 he played banjo on A Collection of Instrumentals by Section House for Mountain Fever.

East Nash Grass, a band of young Nashville sidemen with James Kee on guitar, Harry Clark on mandolin, Maddie Denton on fiddle and Gaven Largent on dobro, released its self-titled debut in 2021, with Walker on banjo, and he also played on Denton’s Playin’ in This Town that year. The band’s Last Chance to Win (Mountain Fever, 2023) and All God’s Children (Mountain Fever, 2025) followed, and in September 2024 it was named New Artist of the Year at the IBMA awards.

School Project (Mountain Fever, September 2023) is mostly instrumental, with Walker on banjo and resonator guitar. Its guests include Tim O’Brien singing Jarrod Walker and Christian Ward’s “Far Away Again,” Rodney Dillard and Herb Pedersen on Bob Dylan’s “One Too Many Mornings,” and Sierra Ferrell on Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart’s “Tried to Ruin My Name,” with David Grier, Mike Compton and Dennis Crouch among the players. He wrote “Marlin’s Waltz” with his father and “Walker’s Backstep” with the fiddler Nate Leath.

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