There’s an old saying, “Behind every good man, there’s a good woman.” In east Tennessee banjo picker Lincoln Hensley’s case, it’s “the man behind the man.” The young banjoist is quick to credit 84-year-old Edison Wallin, a fellow Unicoi County, TN resident and longtime accomplished musician, as the man who set him on his life’s path and passion.
Lincoln confessed, “Edison is without doubt one of the most gifted and creative musicians I’ve had the pleasure of knowing.”
The humble gentleman has never sought fame or recognition for his talents. Lincoln thought it was time that his mentor received some acknowledgement for the role he has played in the music world. Here is Edison’s story in his own words.
“When I was four years old, we moved from Madison County, NC, where I was born, to Niagara Falls, NY. It was during the second World War because there wasn’t any industry around here. They were hiring up there and my dad, Roy Wallin, went to work for the Carborundum Company. Ralph Lewis (who later played with Bill Monroe) was too young to work so he stayed around with us. I can remember he, my mom, dad, and a guy that picked electric guitar, Benny Mitchell, playing together. That’s the earliest music that I can remember.
When we moved back to Unicoi, TN in 1948, Daddy had a 1936 Dodge. There were seven of us piled into the car for the trip home: my parents, grandmother, two sisters, Ralph Lewis, and me. It took us three or four days. We had all of our belongings on a rack built behind the car attached to the back bumper. It’s a wonder that we got here! Ralph came with us and stayed a long time after we got back to Unicoi. He ended up playing with Bill (Monroe). He sung lead and played the guitar.
I was about 11 or 12 years old and my mother, Helen Fain Wallin, bought me a Harmony arch top guitar for Christmas. My dad picked banjo and my mom played rhythm guitar and piano. My paternal grandmother, Sylvia Shelton Wallin, played the banjo. My grandfather, Rance Wallin, picked it, too. I don’t know how many generations picked the banjo, but they played the old drop-thumb style. I could never figure that out and Dad could never show me exactly what he was doing. I played guitar with him. I got interested in Chet Atkins and Merle Travis.
I grew up with the Powers Brothers. Page Powers was a great guitar player. I learned a lot off of him. He had a younger brother, James, who was my age, and an older brother, Hank. They played country music. They were good at singing Louvin Brothers’ songs. I just learned to play with them. They were the brothers I never had.
All through the years, I never did get interested in what you call ‘bluegrass’ until I was in my 30s in the 1970s. It was about the time the Deliverance movie came out (1972). I had listened to Bud Rose. He was the only banjo player that I could remember seeing on TV. I could watch him play and tell there was some kind of pattern to that, the rolls.
Later on, after I was married, I was down at the barber shop one day. Barber shops were the trading place in every community. I traded an old piece of a shotgun for a Harmony closed back banjo. I fooled with it a month or so. The first tune that I learned to play was Lady of Spain. It wasn’t good, but I could play a little bit of that because I figured out the only difference in a banjo and a guitar is the first string and fifth. The first banjo string is D while a guitar first string is E.
A good friend of mine, Furman Bryant, married my first cousin, Lois Fain, in Unicoi. We had all grown up together. That Harmony banjo wore me out! There wasn’t anyone around here that knew anything about banjo rolls. I gave it to Furman to try to figure it out. He went to Susan Carson’s Music Store in Elizabethton and ran into E.C. Miller. He talked to E.C. about taking some banjo lessons. E.C. said, ‘If you could get five or six that want to take lessons, I’ll come to your house one night a week and teach them as a group.’ I thought that was the worst idea in the world, but I told Furman that I would do that.
We went down to Furman’s house on a Tuesday evening. E.C. came and went around and showed us Cripple Creek, Cumberland Gap, and Fireball Mail using Scruggs banjo rolls. He was a great Scruggs player. As you caught on, he separated you out with someone else on your level. He was smart to do it that way. It turned out to be a good thing. I probably took lessons six months, but after I learned the rolls I thought I could do it on my own.”
Edison began picking banjo with the Powers Brothers.
“The Powers Brothers sang a lot of gospel music and we played a lot in church. I learned to play with the electric guitar and learned to play songs like Help Me Make It Through The Night and Never on a Sunday, but of course, those weren’t church songs! Most people think you can’t use a banjo with an electric guitar. Page Powers played styles like Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, and Paul Yandell that played with the Louvin Brothers.
We sung at a homecoming at a church at Rock Creek, and Walter Bailes was there. He said, ‘I’ve got to play in Johnson City tonight. Would you come and play the banjo with me?’ So we went to a church out in Sinking Creek in Johnson City. It was probably a year or two later that I realized who Walter Bailes was. He was one of the Bailes Brothers that were Opry stars. He wrote Dust on the Bible and several other gospel songs. He didn’t mention anything of that to me and I didn’t really know who he was. He jokingly introduced me as Opie. I just played that one night and then he was gone. He didn’t live around here anywhere and I didn’t know where he was from.
Eventually, the Powers Brothers made an album at Lasting Sounds Studio in Bristol, TN. James wrote two or three of the songs. We were green and worked all the songs out at home. We went over to the studio around 4:00 in the evening and by 8:00 or 9:00, we had the album made! We did it all in four or five hours!
I played guitar with the Brotherhood Quartet out of Elizabethton, TN. I played guitar and banjo with the Landmarks out of Erwin, TN. The Landmarks made an album in Nashville produced by Dirk Johnson, piano player for Bill Anderson. Dirk Johnson was the piano player for the Brotherhood Quartet when I played with them. He’s still with Bill Anderson. I picked banjo on a couple of cuts on the Landmarks’ album. Since I wasn’t in the musicians’ union I had to go in the studio after hours and put in a couple of tracks.
Later, I played banjo with the group, Bluegrass Tradition. The other members were Herb Greene, Herman Coffey, Ronald Gunter, and Terry Barnes. We made a CD. Two albums, and a CD were the extent of my musical career. I think they’re on YouTube.”
A machinist by trade, music was his hobby.
Lincoln noted, “He’s an incredibly talented machinist and has made some very impressive ‘banjo gadgets’ we will call them.”
“One time we were in his garage and I saw this big aluminum thing with arms sticking out of it, lying on top of his tool box. I asked him what it was and he said, ‘It’s a B bender I made for the banjo.’ It’s all concealed into the tailpiece and raised the second string from a B note to a C, then it can raise the third string from a G note to an A. It had these metal arms coming out of it that were bent very carefully to fit around your right arm just above your wrist. That is the part that controls the pull system for the strings, almost like knee levers on a pedal steel. He told me he took the metal shelf out of his wife’s bread oven, then cut and bent that into those arms! He’s really a genius when it comes down to it.”
Edison was far from finished with playing music. He continued to perform for the Unicoi Church of God where he attended, playing guitar and banjo.
“In the early 80s, Hoyt Herbert dated a girl this side of Johnson City, and they’d go to Slagle’s Pasture. They had a square dance every Saturday night and sometimes they’d hire the Lincoln County Partners. Hoyt picked the banjo with them. Hoyt would dance with his girlfriend a while, then he and I would go over behind the stage. He would show me his banjo tunes. He was a great banjo player.
Allen Shelton always appealed to me and Hoyt Herbert played a whole lot like Allen. Hoyt did a lot of inside rolls. When Earl Scruggs played banjo, he never left the bottom two strings with his index finger. Hoyt would bring them up a set of strings and that opened up a whole new world for banjo players.
A skilled cabinet maker, Hoyt built a set of cabinets for my kitchen. He moved to Elk Park, NC. My family camped a lot at Elk River Falls Campground. Hoyt would come down and we would sit around the camp fire and pick. I played the banjo at the Fall festival in Denton with him after his stroke because I knew most of his tunes.
I played with the Pleasant Hill Band, a local group, with Tom and Beverly Horton and Mike Honeycutt.”
Edison continued to play music in local jams.
‘There’s a place below my house called the Red Barn. Probably in late ’70s, Burl Mass retired from service and built a pole barn where he did small engine repair. He was one that started taking banjo lessons with us (from EC Miller). He had a pot belly stove; he hung a tarpaulin and cut off most of the building. He left a room for us to play. There would be maybe 15 people on Thursday nights to jam and we did that for years. I retired (from my day job) in 2000, so I’ve been retired 24 years.’
Edison has a small family. He has been married to Emma Jean for 61 years. They have one daughter, Amy (married to Paul Tipton), and no grandchildren, unless you count Lincoln Hensley who has become like his grandson.
“We were married 17 years before my daughter, Amy, came along.”
Then about twelve years ago, Edison Wallin met Lincoln Hensley and both their lives were forever changed.
Edison related, “There was a community center at Shallow Ford that had been Farnor Store. They would play there on Saturday nights. Lincoln and his parents came in, seems like Lincoln was 14 years old. He came up to me and asked, ‘Will you teach me to play the banjo?’ I said, ‘Yeah, if I can.’ I was retired, and didn’t want to get tied down to a specific time because I liked to get out and do other things. I played around at different places like the Red Barn and a log cabin down close to Johnson City. I said, ‘I tell you what, when I go to those places, you can go with me and I’ll show you anything that you want to learn.'”
Lincoln recalled their first meeting, “During the break, I asked if he gave banjo lessons. He said, ‘No, but play me something,’ and handed me his banjo. I played probably the worst version of Cripple Creek and Foggy Mountain Breakdown you’ve ever heard. (It was every note I knew at the time.) He sat down and showed me a better way to play those tunes, and helped fix a few of my technique problems right then and there.”
There was an instant connection and Edison realized he had made a friend.
“Lincoln went with me a time or two, then he got to calling me when he got off of school in the evening. He asked me to teach him something. He’s so smart that you can just tell him what strings and what roll and he can listen and pick it up. He learned to play ALL the stuff that I played, even the guitar stuff.”
Lincoln agreed, “We ended up having ‘lessons’ over my parent’s landline phone every day. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but he’d play it for me and tell me what string to hit. That really helped me with training my ears to listen instead of watching him.”
“Lincoln called me one night and said, ‘I want to learn Cannonball Rag.’ I said, ‘You got to play the rhythm with your thumb, and you got to play the melody with your index finger. It’s hard to separate. It’s just like rubbing your head and patting your stomach. After a while, you’ll eventually forget about keeping the timing thing. It will just be automatic, then you’ll be able to pick the melody with that rhythm.'”
Lincoln began to work on playing the rhythm on the guitar with his thumb. He spent a lot of hours perfecting the technique. Once he had it, he called Edison, who was surprised at how quickly the young man had learned.
“I really forgot about it and then he asked me again to teach him Cannonball Rag. In about 45 minutes, he could play it just like me. It was amazing!”
Edison introduced Lincoln to Sonny Osborne’s banjo picking when he gave him a DVD of Bluegrass Country Soul one Christmas.
“We would listen to Bobby (Osborne) when he would talk. For some reason, he hated Danny Boy. Sonny would start playing it in the background. Lincoln and me would talk about how pretty that tune was. Lincoln likes the same kind of music that I do, like big band music, like Five Foot Two, Sweet Georgia Brown, Whispering, and those good songs. One fellow asked me, ‘You still pickin’ that crazy music?'”
Edison’s eclectic playing impressed Lincoln. “He’s constantly working out arrangements for a new tune he’s run across. He can play any type of song on the banjo, but his favorite is the older big band and swing-style tunes. I’ve heard him play everything from Mr. Sandman to Peg of My Heart, or country music standards such as Ray Price’s City Lights or Crazy Arms.”
The two music lovers bonded and have become fast friends, talking on the phone daily.
The senior picker admitted. “He calls me every day. He thinks I’m his grandpa, I reckon. I got to taking him out of school his junior or senior year. I’d check him out and we’d go to nursing homes and play. I about caused him to fail! We’ve had a time. He is just like a grandson to me.”
In 2022, Lincoln approached Edison about portraying his grandpa in a music video for the Tennessee Bluegrass Band’s single, Tall Weeds & Rust.
Edison explained, “His grandpa had just passed away. He wanted me to do that. I said, ‘OK.’ So we went to his grandpa’s old home place. That song just fit the place. It was fun. We did it one evening. A guy (film maker) drove up here from Nashville. Lincoln told him, ‘You don’t have to write out any script. Just leave us alone and let us do our own thing.’ So that’s what he did.”
Edison is very proud of Lincoln and his accomplishments in the music industry.
“Lincoln is amazing. When I taught him banjo and then guitar, it wasn’t long until he had ran past me. When we would go to the Red Barn and play, there’s a guy over there we call Leaner. He would come up and lean over and talk in your ear. He said, ‘You’re going to keep on teaching that boy and he’s going to get better than you.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s what I’m doing it for. I don’t want him to stop where I’m at for I’m not anything great. I want him to be way better than me.’
Leaner didn’t like that. He was trying to get something started. He went over to Lincoln and said, ‘I think you can pick better than Edison now.’ Lincoln told him, ‘If you hear me play, it’s what Edison showed me.’ That Lincoln is pretty quick!”
In the meantime, Hensley has also befriended another elderly musician who lives not too far away in western NC.
Edison explained…
“When they put Lincoln’s friend in the hospital, they said he had tested positive for the flu, but he didn’t have any symptoms. He wasn’t running a temperature, wasn’t coughing. The doctor came in and was checking him out. The patient told him that Lincoln was his grandson (which is the claim used to allow Lincoln to visit in the first place). Lincoln kindly questioned the doctor. He said, ‘I’ve never heard of anyone having the flu, but not having symptoms. Could it be a false positive?’ That doctor wheeled around and said, ‘Maybe you want to be the doctor.’ Lincoln responded, ‘Well, I thought about it, but I figured I could make more money picking a banjo.’ He‘s got wisdom way beyond his age.”
And Lincoln gives credit back to Edison for that mature wisdom.
“Edison has probably the sharpest and quickest sense of humor out of everyone I know. Above all that, he’s a great man, and has absolutely no ego at all. You’d never hear Edison bragging on his own playing, the things he’s done, or what kind of person he is. So getting to talk a little about him in this article is my chance to do so. He deserves it, and it’s way overdue!”
