Wayne Benson

John Wayne Benson grew up in a musical family in the Charlotte area of North Carolina; his father played fiddle, banjo and guitar. He was given a Roy Rogers guitar for Christmas at seven, and when his father, a building contractor, took a Harmony mandolin in payment of a debt, he gave it to Wayne, who taught himself to play it from about fifteen. He went to festivals with his parents and in his late teens was part of the bluegrass scene around Denton, North Carolina. Among the early influences he names is Boone Creek.

In 1989 the banjo player Scott Vestal invited him into Livewire, with Ernie Sykes on bass and Robert Hale on guitar, and over three years with the band he recorded one album for Rounder, Wired. In December 1992 he replaced Alan Bibey in IIIrd Tyme Out, and his first album with the band was Grandpa’s Mandolin for Rebel. He stayed through the band’s Rounder years, from Letter to Home to the gospel Living on the Other Side (1996), the live Live at the MAC (1998), John & Mary (1999) and Back to the MAC (2001), the stretch in which IIIrd Tyme Out was IBMA Vocal Group of the Year seven years in a row.

His first album under his own name, An Instrumental Anthology (Pinecastle, 2003), was made up of twelve of his own compositions, ranging from straight-ahead bluegrass to more progressive melodies, with Jeff Autry, John Cowan, Aubrey Haynie, Rob Ickes, Mark Schatz, Ron Stewart, Jim VanCleve and Scott Vestal among the players. The same year Gibson issued the Wayne Benson Signature mandolin in its Artist Signature Series, an F-5 style instrument with cosmetic details to his specifications, limited to fifty. In 2004 he made an instructional DVD for AcuTab, which also published a book of his solos. He shared in three IBMA awards on multi-artist projects: the Recorded Event of the Year for Pinecastle’s Bluegrass ’95 (1996), with Scott Vestal, Aubrey Haynie, Adam Steffey, Barry Bales and Clay Jones; the 2001 instrumental award for Rebel’s Knee Deep in Bluegrass: The AcuTab Sessions; and the 2006 Album of the Year, the charity collection Celebration of Life: Musicians Against Childhood Cancer.

In 2004 he left IIIrd Tyme Out for the John Cowan Band, a newgrass group led by the former New Grass Revival singer and bassist, and made two albums in three years with it, among them New Tattoo (Pinecastle, 2006), where he played mandolin and sang alongside Jeff Autry, Luke Bulla, Shad Cobb and Noam Pikelny. He returned to IIIrd Tyme Out in May 2007, and stayed with the band as it became Russell Moore & IIIrd Tyme Out.

With Alan Bibey, his predecessor in the band, he made The Mandolin Chronicles (Pinecastle, 12 March 2013), ten instrumentals and one vocal song recorded on the two players’ vintage F-5s. Five tracks are mandolin duets, recorded in Bibey’s South Carolina studio; the rest were cut at Eastwood Studio in Cana, Virginia, with Ron Stewart on banjo and fiddle, Wyatt Rice on guitar and Harold Nixon on bass. Benson wrote “Wintergrass” and “Wilkes County Breakdown,” and the two wrote “Owensboro Train,” “Black Friday” and “Surfside” together; the set also includes a previously unrecorded Bill Monroe number, “Pilgrim’s Knob,” and Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time.” Within IIIrd Tyme Out he also plays electric mandolin and mandola.

In 2021, during the pandemic, he and his wife, the Grascals’ banjo player Kristin Scott Benson, recorded together for the first time, as the duo Benson, at Mountain Home’s studio in Asheville. Their first single, his instrumental “Conway,” written on the IIIrd Tyme Out bus at a festival in Conway, South Carolina, came out in February 2022, and the album Pick Your Poison followed on Mountain Home on 31 March 2023, with Cody Kilby, Jim VanCleve and a group of guest singers, and his instrumentals “The Fest of Rudy” and “Riverside” alongside “Conway.” In March 2025 the duo released Harley Allen’s “Things Have Changed” as a single, and Benson was then still the mandolinist with Russell Moore & IIIrd Tyme Out.