Acoustic Guitar Magazine | 8 years ago

Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley are A-list Nashville pickers. Individually or together, these talented players have contributed to sessions by Merle Haggard, Earl Scruggs, and Toby Keith, among others; organized the annual Nashville-based Resosummit; and picked up a 2016 Best Bluegrass Album Grammy nomination for their widely acclaimed album Before the Sun Goes Down.

Ickes is the founder of Blue Highway and will be teaching at the 2016 Resosummit. A 15-time winner of the IBMA’s Dobro Player of the Year Award, he was the youngest player on the classic 1994 album The Great Dobro Sessions, which also featured Dobro legends Mike Auldridge and Jerry Douglas.

Hensley is a prolific singer and songwriter who has recorded with Blue Highway and shared the stage with Marty Stuart, Johnny and June Carter Cash, Ricky Skaggs, and Charlie Daniels, to name a few.

The duo—Ickes, on a Scheerhorn resonator guitar with Indian Rosewood back and sides, and a spruce top; and Hensley, on a Taylor 510e-FLTD—dropped by the Acoustic Guitar Sessions studio to perform three songs: “Elton John’s “Ballad of a Well-Known Gun,” which is featured on the duo’s latest album The Country Blues (Compass); and the original Hensley songs “That’s What Leavin’s For” and “Everywhere I Go Is a Long Way from Home.”