Trey Hensley

Musician · b. 1990 · Johnson City, Tennessee
Best known for Guitar Lead Vocals

Trey Hensley is an East Tennessee guitarist and singer who was famous at eleven, disappeared into ordinary life for a decade, and came back as one of the hardest-driving flatpickers in the music. His playing runs on country and blues as much as bluegrass — bent strings, electric phrasing worked out on an acoustic — and his singing is a full-throated honky-tonk baritone, which together made the decade-long duo with Dobro player Rob Ickes one of the most distinctive acts in acoustic music.

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  • Born Trey Aaron Hensley on September 27, 1990, in Johnson City, Tennessee, and raised in Telford, he started singing in a gospel group at six and took up bluegrass guitar after hearing Charlie Waller and Jimmy Martin.
  • At eleven, barely a year into the instrument, he played the Grand Ole Opry with Marty Stuart and Earl Scruggs, singing “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy.”
  • He met Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash at the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons, Virginia, and played June’s birthday party in 2002; Cash sent him to Tom T. Hall, who produced his debut album in 2003, when he was twelve.
  • He moved to Nashville in 2013 and fell in with Rob Ickes, a fifteen-time IBMA Dobro Player of the Year looking for a new project after Blue Highway.
  • Their first record together, Before the Sun Goes Down (Compass, 2015), earned a Grammy nomination for Best Bluegrass Album and turned a side project into both men’s main act.
  • Three more followed on Compass — The Country Blues (2016), World Full of Blues (2019) and Living in a Song (2023) — cut largely live in the studio with few overdubs, a deliberate choice that keeps the duo’s interplay intact on the record.
  • He was named the IBMA’s Guitar Player of the Year in 2023 and again in 2025.
  • In February 2025 he won his first Grammy, as a member of the Taj Mahal Sextet, whose Swingin’ Live at the Church in Tulsa took Best Traditional Blues Album — a credit that says as much about his range as any bluegrass award.
  • He and Ickes announced a hiatus from the duo at the end of 2025 after more than a decade together.
  • Before the partnership he sang and played with Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers, and he turns up as a guest across the Nashville acoustic scene, including Bob Minner’s Randall Collins.
  • Acoustic Guitar called him Nashville’s hottest young player; what sets him apart is less speed than attack — he plays an acoustic with a lead guitarist’s vocabulary, leaning on bends and blues phrasing where a flatpicker would run a fiddle-tune line.

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