Lincoln Hensley
Lincoln Hensley is a banjo player from Erwin, Tennessee, who leads the Tennessee Bluegrass Band. He studied for years with Sonny Osborne, went into the banjo business with him as KRAKO Banjos, and plays in the style of Earl Scruggs and Osborne.
He grew up in Erwin, in Unicoi County, and first heard bluegrass as a boy at the stage in the town’s small downtown park. He took up the banjo at fourteen, choosing it from the guitar, banjo and fiddle his father kept at home. After three lessons at a local music store he found his teacher in the local musician Edison Wallin, who taught him for four years and gave him the film Bluegrass Country Soul one Christmas; the Osborne Brothers’ segment, with Sonny Osborne playing a six-string banjo, drew him to Osborne’s playing. In high school he played for about three years in the UCHS Bluegrass Band.
He went on to East Tennessee State University’s Bluegrass, Old-Time and Country Music Studies program, where he had his own band, Straight Drive. On the online forum Banjo Hangout he began writing to Osborne, who told him to learn Earl Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Banjo note for note before they talked banjo. After about nine months Hensley sent him a video of the third break of “Sally Goodin,” and in his freshman year Osborne took him on as a student. Hensley then made a four-hour drive each month to learn at Osborne’s home. In April 2018, at Osborne’s invitation, he played “Rocky Top” on the Grand Ole Opry with Bobby Osborne and the Rocky Top X-Press, and he went on to play the Opry with them several times. In March 2019, not yet twenty-one, he was announced as the new banjo player with the Price Sisters, a band from Ohio.
The banjo company grew out of an instrument Osborne assembled from spare parts and asked Hensley to take on the road. When players at the Osborne Brothers’ festival asked where they could order one, Osborne and Hensley went into partnership as KRAKO Banjos, named after the imaginary friend Osborne had blamed for mistakes on stage. The banjos are patterned on Osborne’s 1934 Gibson Granada, and Hensley assembles and fits each one. He has also been an endorsing artist for Recording King banjos.
He played banjo on two tracks of Industrial Strength Bluegrass: Southwestern Ohio’s Musical Legacy (Smithsonian Folkways, 2021), produced by Joe Mullins: “20/20 Vision,” sung by Dan Tyminski, and “The Rolling Mills of Middletown,” sung by Larry Cordle, both with Sierra Hull on mandolin, Glen Duncan on fiddle and Ben Isaacs on bass.
In the early summer of 2021 he formed his own band, and Osborne suggested the name, the Tennessee Bluegrass Band. That August it signed with Billy Blue Records, with John Meador on guitar and lead vocals, Gracie Meador on bass, Aynsley Porchak, a classmate from ETSU, on fiddle and Tim Laughlin on mandolin. Osborne died later in 2021, and in September 2022 Hensley accepted Osborne’s induction into the Banjo Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. By 2024 the band had Michael Feagan on fiddle and the brothers Jacob and Josiah Sheffield on guitar and bass, with Hensley and Laughlin the founding members who remained. Its second album, Nolichucky (2025), was the first the band produced itself; the title song, written in 1975 by the local bandleader Leon Kiser, was pitched to the band by Charlie Powers, who had played guitar on Kiser’s original record.
On 12 July 2024 Erwin and Unicoi County dedicated the stage in the town’s Gathering Place park, where he had first heard bluegrass, as the Lincoln Hensley Stage. In 2026 he was granted an artist residency at the renovated Capitol Hall in Erwin.
