MANCHESTER, NH – The past 10 years have been very fruitful for both dobro player Rob Ickes and guitarist Trey Hensley. Together, they’ve won a bunch of awards, put out a few albums and collaborated with some bonafide legends in the bluegrass, folk, blues and country genres. Musical collaboration can be a special thing when everything comes together seamlessly, and this duo is one of the many examples of this fact. On July 26, Ickes and Hensley are going to be performing at The Rex Theatre in Manchester. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. and it promises to be an ideal experience for anyone who enjoys acoustic and string-based music.
I had a talk with both Ickes and Hensley about how this partnership came together, being part of a Grammy-winning live album and what their plans are after this year.
The Rex Theatre
23 Amherst St, Manchester, NH
Tickets
Rob Duguay: Rob, you initially made your mark in bluegrass as a dobro player for the Nashville based band Blue Highway, and Trey, you’ve been playing guitar since you were a kid while making your first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry at the age of 11 while sharing the stage with Marty Stuart and Earl Scruggs. Coming from these different backgrounds, how did you initially get together to form this musical partnership?
Rob Ickes: I met Trey when he was just a kid and I guess it was a few months after he debuted at the Opry. I was playing with Earl Scruggs at the time and Earl was a big fan of Trey’s, he would always invite him to sit in with the band whenever we played in East Tennessee. I remember at the Tennessee Theater in Knoxville when Trey came backstage before the show and he came out on stage with us and just crushed it. I was like, “Wow! This guy is really good.” Then I kind of didn’t see him for a few years, but Trey moved to Nashville back in 2013 or 2014 and we started working together.
I couldn’t believe how good this guy was and I still remember us taping our first rehearsal, listening to it later and saying, ”Wow!”. That’s how we started working together, we ended up doing an album that was nominated for a Grammy and that was kind of about the time we started doing it full-time, which was about 10 years ago. It’s been a great experience.
Trey Hensley: I’ve crossed paths with Rob a bunch over the years while doing some shows with Blue Highway and some shows with Earl. I’ve always been a big fan of Rob’s and it’s been great ever since we started this when I first moved to Nashville.
RD: When it comes to the essence of collaboration, what makes this partnership stand out for each of you as musicians? What makes this click between the two of you?
TH: I think for one big part, we’re into a lot of the same kinds of music. It’s been great because we can sort of do whatever ranging from the outliers of bluegrass to some jazzier stuff or some blues from working with people like Taj Mahal and people like Rodney Crowell on the country side of things. We’ve both kind of been influenced by the same music, so a lot of times, even when we’re just talking about things, we both know the same records, we know the same tunes and that’s been a big part of it. We’re sort of drinking from the same well, musically speaking, and I think it really kind of shows when we’re playing.
RI: I would agree with that and I remember when we first started getting together, I knew that Trey was very knowledgeable on bluegrass and country. Then we started talking about Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and then he really turned me on to The Allman Brothers. I knew the radio hits, but he really made me dig deeper into their music and other blues artists that I was kind of familiar with. Trey had done a deep dive on a lot of these great blues artists, so we do have a common background, but we’ve also turned each other on to different styles and different artists that neither of us were familiar with before. It’s just the love of lots of different types of music, and I think Trey and I can hear that commonality.
You wouldn’t have bluegrass without the blues and you wouldn’t have country music without Hawaiian music, it was us going deeper with our history and our knowledge. I think that’s why Taj Mahal liked working with us because he’s like that too. He’s up on African music, Brazilian music and Caribbean music, he’s really just a music expert and I think we both clicked with Taj on that. We found that we were kindred spirits as far as having a wide musical palate.
RD: Speaking of Taj, you both were part of his band for his live album “Swingin’ Live At The Church In Tulsa”. It won a Grammy earlier this year, so would you say that’s your proudest accomplishment as a duo or is it something else?
TH: It’s up there. That’s definitely a big highlight, and I think that Grammy nomination for our first record was a big highlight as well. We’ve done a lot of great things, but those are definitely two biggies.
RI: When we first started working together full-time, all of these doors kept opening with this project. I remember when we were first starting out, I called our booking agent and I said, “I love Tommy Emmanuel, I don’t know him, but I just think he would like what we’re doing.” It turns out their best friend was managing Tommy, so he reached out and then he called back later that day telling us they had three shows in California if we wanted to open them. We said, “Yes”, and it was right at the beginning of our West Coast run so it was absolutely perfect. We played the Palace Of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco with Tommy, that was our first gig, and all of these things were clicking.
He had just played Bakersfield the night before, so we were talking about Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. Tommy knows all of these Buck Owens instrumentals and Trey knows them too, so those guys started playing a great medley of all these great Buck Owens tunes. I learned one of his songs, which is a beautiful ballad that was on his latest record, so we clicked with Tommy on so many, many levels. We ended up touring together a lot over the last 10 years, and one of the trips was with David Grisman. Tommy had just done a duo record with him, so we did that and it was a pretty big tour for a month all over the country.
We also ended up recording an EP with Tommy along with doing a lot of YouTube stuff. Because we’re a duo, we can plug into a lot of these other acts and complement them like we did with Taj. We had him sing on our “World Full of Blues” album, then we became friends and we opened some shows for him. Then he had us join the band for a few months, so all of the different artists we’ve been able to work with has been a highlight and I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make.
RD: I totally get that point and it’s awesome that you’ve had so many doors open since you’ve started this project. You both mentioned how you’re based down south in Nashville, but what are your thoughts on coming up north to play The Rex Theatre? When it comes to playing bluegrass, folk and country, do the audiences up here have a different reaction to it than down south or out west?
TH: I think it’s pretty universal, but I love going up north because there’s such a great scene up there. We seem to play in New Hampshire and around the Northeast a lot and it’s such a beautiful part of the world. It is funny that bluegrass is universal no matter where you go, it’s kind of a universal language.
RI: We’re playing in the Northeast a lot this summer and we always have. I’ll say that the West Coast is a hot spot for us and Colorado seems like it has always been pro-bluegrass. I remember when we did the Grey Fox Festival a couple years ago, which is in Upstate New York, and it’s very eclectic, it’s not just bluegrass, but I think it kind of started as a bluegrass festival. They went absolutely nuts when we were there and I think we were getting a lot of airplay in that area. We do great in Northampton, Massachusetts, we do great in Maine and in New Hampshire we’ve played Portsmouth several times, so we’ve been all over.
We play Europe a lot and Australia, so it’s definitely universal.
RD: It just got mentioned in the news that you’re going to be putting this partnership on hiatus after this year, so what are each of your plans moving forward after 2025 comes to a close?
RI: We’ve been talking about this since the fall and we’re still having a great time working together. Trey’s been getting a lot of great attention online and his career is really taking off. You’ve talked about what’s got us together, and that was really the inspiration. When Trey moved to Nashville and we started playing together, I was just an instant fan of his and I wanted to spread the word about him. Then it kind of turned into a gig for both of us and it’s been amazing, but for somebody who sings and plays as well as he does, there’s a larger potential market for him and I want him to go as far as he can, and he does too.
I’m sure that we’ll keep playing together on some level or another, because like I said, we’re still having a great time and we’ve always gotten along great. I might be doing some stuff with Darrell Scott and I’m ready to slow down on the touring end of things. I still have a lot of music things that I want to accomplish and I do a lot of session stuff in Nashville. I’ve got a nice home studio so I do a lot of recording there and I got a teaching website so I’m just going to see what happens. If I end up just hanging in Nashville more, that’s fine with me also, but that’s kind of on my radar.
TH: For me, I’m working on a couple different solo records. The way that we’ve been doing this, it’s intentionally open-ended because we’re still having a great time and we’re going to do stuff into the future. There’s no hard cutoff for this partnership to end and I feel like we’ll always be playing together in some capacity. It’s not really necessarily the end of anything as much as it is just sort of a shift and a difference in our touring schedule. I’m going to be doing some acoustic band stuff next year, maybe even some electric stuff.
I play some electric, but I don’t play it that often, so I want to play a handful of trio electric gigs and stuff like that. This gives us both time to do some different things while still working on our own music, some stuff together and everything else.