Alice Schnelligkeit

Violet Hensley

Violet Hensley at work on one of her handcrafted fiddles, the tools of her trade laid beside her in the Ozark hills.

Violet plays fiddle beside the family hearth — the same fireplace where she once dried the wood for her earliest handmade instruments.

Violet Hensley performs on the Grand Ole Opry stage in 2016 at age ninety-nine, fulfilling a dream carried for a lifetime.

Violet performing at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, where she was a beloved fixture for more than fifty years.

Violet in her kitchen in Yellville, Arkansas — the fiddle always close at hand, always being played.

Violet Brumley Hensley was born on October 21, 1916, in Mount Ida, Montgomery County, Arkansas, the daughter of George Washington Brumley and Nora Springer Brumley. She grew up deep in the Ouachita National Forest, in a rural household where music was a way of life. Her father, himself a self-taught musician who had built his own fiddle at age fourteen, filled the home with the sound of strings — and in that sound, young Violet found her calling.

With only a partial third-grade education and no ability to read music, Violet learned entirely by ear and by watching. "If I can't put it in my head, I can't put it on the fiddle," she would later say. At fifteen, she told her father she wanted to make a fiddle of her own. She observed his every technique, selecting native woods, drying them by the family fireplace, and carving each piece by hand. Between 1932 and 1934, before she was twenty years old, she had already made four fiddles. In 1935, she married Adren Hensley and raised a family of nine or ten children, setting aside her fiddle-making for decades while family came first.

Her public life as a performer and craftsperson blossomed late and brilliantly. In 1962, friends persuaded Violet — then forty-six years old — to enter the Turkey Trot Talent Show in Yellville, Arkansas. She won second place and met legendary folk musician Jimmy Driftwood, who invited her to perform at his theater in Mountain View. By 1967, after the family had settled in Yellville, she began demonstrating her craft at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, where she would become one of its most beloved figures for more than fifty years. National Geographic featured her work in 1970, and television appearances followed — from The Beverly Hillbillies and Captain Kangaroo to Live with Regis and Kathie Lee and the CBS Evening News. Charles Kuralt brought her story to millions on his "On the Road" series. She performed at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and, in 2016 at age ninety-nine, fulfilled a lifelong dream by playing the Grand Ole Opry.

The honors came steadily: Arkansas Living Treasure (2004), the Folk Alliance International Spirit of Folk Award (2016), and induction into the National Fiddler Hall of Fame (2018). She published her autobiography, Whittlin' and Fiddlin' My Own Way, in 2014. Over her lifetime she crafted approximately seventy-three fiddles — each one representing roughly 240 hours of carving, chiseling, and sanding, yielding, as she put it, "a five-gallon bucket filled with shavings."

Known as the "Whittling Fiddler" and the "Stradivarius of the Ozarks," Violet Hensley was above all a keeper of tradition — generous with her time, her music, and her knowledge. She died at her home in Yellville on August 7, 2026, at the remarkable age of 109, leaving behind generations of musicians she had inspired and a legacy carved as carefully as every instrument she ever made.

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