Ms. Hensley told The Springfield News-Leader, a Missouri newspaper, “I was just me. Yes, I was pleased. But it’s still just me. You don’t want to try to be somebody you’re not.”
She performed twice more at the Opry, in 2017 and in 2018, the year she was inducted into the National Fiddler Hall of Fame in Tulsa, Okla.
Mary Violet Brumley was born on Oct. 21, 1916, in Alamo, Ark., near Mount Ida, in the central-western part of the state. Her father, George Washington Brumley, was a farmer, and her mother, Nora (Springer) Brumley, who ran the home, died when Violet was 11.
She observed her father making fiddles and, at 15, began to build her own, splitting, planing and shaping wood that she found nearby. She had begun playing at 12.
“I wanted to play the fiddle just because we didn’t have anything else to do,” she told KCPT, the public television station in Kansas City, Mo. “We didn’t have television or radio, and Dad played, and I guess it struck me that I wanted to play.”
After she married Adren Hensley in 1935 and began to raise their nine children, she stopped whittling and performing (she also sang and clogged) for 27 years, until she re-emerged in the 1960s, winning second place in the Turkey Trot Talent Show in Yellville.
