Denny Hengen was born on June 10, 1943 in Honolulu, Hawaii, the son of an Army doctor and a civilian nurse. His family, which now included a younger brother, moved to Missouri when Denny was about five, where two sister were subsequently added to the Hengen household. Doctor Hengen set up a family practice in the St. Louis suburbs in a town that at that time was called Pattonville, but was later incorporated into Bridgeton.

His musical career began in High School. Denny was awe-struck by a group of kids his own age who had formed a band called The Mistakes. When asked if he played an instrument, he told them that he played the saxophone. "Saying that I played the saxophone may have been a slight exaggeration," he relates. "I owned a second hand sax, and was actually able to play three notes when the planets were all perfectly aligned. I joined the high school band (my God... a band fag!) but was not allowed to actually make any noise with the instrument. I was instructed by the band director to just puff out my cheeks and look like I was playing." He was invited to join The Mistakes, but when it became apparent just how miserable a horn player he was, they made him the band's vocalist.

The band actually developed such a following in St. Louis, that they became the "house band" for the #1 Deejay , KXOK's King Richard. Denny and the band eventually backed some of the legends of Rock n Roll: Chuck Berry, Paul Anka, Bobby Vee, Tony Orlando and Brenda Lee. The leader of the band was an exceptional guitarist by the name of Jim Hendal, who idolized the style of St. Louis band leader, Ike Turner. Hendal insisted that Denny learn every Ike Turner song. One night, Hendal was invited to jam with Ike Turner and the Kings Of Rhythm, and Jim asked if Denny might sing a song with the band. Ike was highly amused to hear a white teenager who knew all the words to even the most obscure Ike Turner song. At 16 years of age, Denny was invited to sing with the band, but first his parents had to be convinced. "Let me explain something about Ike Turner. He was one of the nicest people I had ever met, and the band had the strictest rules regarding conduct. Any musician even suspected of smoking marijuana was instantly canned. I can honestly say that in the three years that I was with Ike, I never saw even a trace of the drugs that would eventually destroy his career". Denny arranged to have Ike invited for Sunday dinner at the Hengen household, where he completely won over the elder Hengens with his wit and charm. "My Dad had an old Hammond Chord Organ in his study, and after dinner Ike sat at the organ singing and playing old southern spirituals for hours. By the time that Ike finally left, it was agreed that I would be allowed to play with Ike on the weekends during the school year and then tour in the summer. To this day I firmly believe that I was kept as a member of the band because I was a novelty, and also for the fact that even in the declining years of the fifties, there were a lot of rural eating places that did not welcome black customers. I would be sent in to buy sandwiches that we would eat in the parking lot."

In 1958, a twenty year old native of Brownsville, TN named Anna May Bullock joined The Review as an Ikette. By 1960 she changed her name to Tina Turner, and the Ike and Tina Turner Review was no longer in need of a teen age white singer. Denny continued to travel with the band as an opening act for a year or two under the unfortunate name of Troy Valentine. "My manager was determined to turn yours truly and another teen singer named Little Mojo into the next Frankie Avalon and Fabian. Thankfully that association was terminated when my parents insisted that I go to college".

It was in college that Denny moved into the folk field. "I had been fooling around with the guitar for years, and anyone who knew three chords could get into a folk group. I eventually hooked up with two guys and two girls to form The Northerners". The Northerners were surprisingly good enough to win several contests which eventually led to hosting their own television show. "The studio was a huge converted barn that had apparently housed huge combines. There were such huge cracks under the doors that snow would blow across the sound stage when the wind was bad enough. The camera would only shoot the girls from the waist up because they would be wearing sweatpants under their dresses." For the next five years Denny took enough college classes to avoid the draft, and had the opportunity to share the stage with Folk greats like The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary and The New Christy Minstrels.

In 1966, Denny was drafted and eventually sent to Viet NAM, where the first four months weren't too different from performing in the states. Because of his college psychology background, he had been assigned to a M*A*S*H unit as a Psychiatric Social Worker, where he teamed up with an Army nurse and toured the outlying fire bases. Then came the Tet Offensive. "Up to that time I was in pretty high cotton. I was in the Army, but I was still doing what I loved to do.... I just wasn't getting paid as much, and occasionally someone in the jungle cheap seats would lob a mortar at us." After Tet, everything changed.... he was in a real war.

When Denny returned from Viet NAM in 1968, he discovered that the music business that he had left had changed dramatically. "John Stewart had left the Kingston Trio. Kenny Rogers had left The Minstrels and was singing some pretty far out stuff as far as I was concerned. Everyone that I had known at the Record labels were gone and I just didn't fit in to the music business anymore. I got married and decided that I had better grow up and find a real job". He went back to school, first taking undergraduate and then graduate credits in Psychology and eventually ending up working in the Psychiatric ward of a V.A. hospital. "What an eye opener that was! Here it was the start of the Seventies, and that ward was run like something out of medieval times. It was lock them up and medicate them'. I began to seriously rock the boat. My wife was a TWA hostess, so we invited some of her fellow Stews to a barbecue where the patients themselves cooked the hamburgers". The patients were delighted, the girls were highly amused , but the Chief of Psychiatry was outraged. Two months later, Denny arranged to include about twenty of his more stable patients in a trip to Dodger stadium. Unfortunately, the game was being televised locally and the camera zoomed in on the patients in their hospital blues to find Denny and his charges happily chomping on Dodger Dogs. The next day Denny was looking for a new employer. "The detail men from the pharmaceutical companies that called on the hospital had been telling me that I was a natural for pharmaceutical sales." He went to work as a salesman in a family owned company and worked his way up to vice president. From there he became the division head of a larger company and then ultimately the head of the Animal Health Division of a Fortune 500 Company.

In the late Eighties, Denny left the Corporate world and opened his first Country Western nightclub. "My wife and I had been country dancing for about ten years at the time. We loved to two step, but we also enjoyed line dancing. There was only one big club in the Los Angeles area at the time and they treated line dancers like they had leprosy. One night when our group had been treated rudely by the manager of The Silver Bullet, I decided that I needed to open a club where the couples and line dancers could peacefully co-exist". Denny opened The Southern Cross at the top of The Holiday Inn in Torrance, CA. Two years later he opened his own place at the Galleria in Redondo Beach, CA where he began to teach a beginning line dance class. Using the performing skills that he had learned through years of being on the stage, to make his classes entertaining as well as informative, he quickly became one of the most popular teachers in the Los Angeles area. An old friend from the record business, who was now a Nashville executive, asked him to choreograph a dance for one his new acts. Unfortunately, the label went bankrupt and the artist wasn't picked up by another label. A year later, independent artist, Scooter Lee asked Denny to choreograph a dance for her new album. Be-Bop-A-Lula was a tremendous success, and Denny's new career as a choreographer was off and running. Since then he has choreographed dances for Jimmy Buffett, Billy Ray Cyrus, Dan Seals, Neal McCoy, The Tractors and many others.

As his stature in Nashville started to grow, he began to travel and teach in more and more areas. By the end of 1994 he was teaching so much that he found that he was running out of new material to teach. There was only one country dance magazine available at that time and he found that it wasn't meeting his needs. " I received my latest issue and found no less than five dances called "Chattahoochie" in the same issue. I called the magazine and complained to the editor. I told her that if her magazine didn't work harder at meeting the needs of more Country Dancers, another magazine was going to come along and capture their business. She agreed with me and suggested that the two of us might want to do just that. We decided to headquarter the magazine in an area that is closely associated with Country Music, and feeling that we would get lost in the big pond of Nashville, we opted for Branson, MO". Denny would be the publisher and Dorothy Guertin would be the editor of what became Step By Step Magazine.

The first issue of Step By Step hit the streets in the spring of 1995. The first three issues were nearly carbon copies of the magazine that Dorothy had previously worked for, and the subscriptions were slow in coming. In July, Step By Step unveiled it's new format and the magazine was on it's way. By April of the following year, Step by Step had become the largest selling Country Dance Magazine. In August and September, the magazine printed a two part BPM (beats per minute) guide that caught the attention of dancers and choreographers around the world. It is a conservative estimate that more than 200,000 dancers will read at least some part of Step By Step every single week of the year.

Denny continues to be in demand at events around the country as an instructor and MC. He has most recently been involved as a judge for TNN's Wild Horse Saloon Dance Contest Tour that began in Las Vegas in September and ends in Cleveland the third week in November. When asked if he gets tired of the hectic pace that his schedule demands, he answers, " I love music, laughter, dance and people. What else would I want to Do"!?