Cody Kilby

He started on his father’s banjo at eight and had a Gibson banjo endorsement by the age of eleven. He took up his mother’s guitar at ten and added mandolin and Dobro at about thirteen. As a boy he entered the contests at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, on several instruments: he won the mandolin championship in 1996 and placed in the flatpicking guitar contest in 1995, 1996 and 1997 before winning it in 1998, and he placed in the national banjo championship as well. At sixteen he recorded Just Me, released by Rebel in 1997, playing every instrument on it himself. In those years he also played the Grand Ole Opry and appeared on television shows such as TNN’s Crook and Chase and Dick Clark’s Prime Time Country.

In 2001 he joined Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder and stayed fourteen years. He played guitar on the band’s Grammy-winning albums Brand New Strings (2004), Instrumentals (2006) and Honoring the Fathers of Bluegrass: Tribute to 1946 and 1947 (2008), and on Music to My Ears (2012), and he played on Skaggs’s collaborations of those years: The Three Pickers with Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson (2003), Salt of the Earth with the Whites and Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby (both 2007), and Hearts Like Ours with Sharon White (2014). Outside the band he played guitar on Beck’s Morning Phase, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2015, and recorded with Dolly Parton, Alison Krauss, Marty Stuart, Ronnie Milsap, the Dixie Chicks and the Chieftains, among others. A second solo album, Many Roads Traveled, was self-released.

The Travelin’ McCourys, formed in 2009 by Ronnie and Rob McCoury, Jason Carter and Alan Bartram of the Del McCoury Band, had worked with a rotating cast of guitarists, among them Jeff Autry, Ronnie Bowman and Jeff White. During DelFest in 2015 they settled on Kilby, and he left Kentucky Thunder to join them full time; Ronnie McCoury said he fitted a band that straddled the fence between traditional and progressive. The band’s first album with him, The Travelin’ McCourys (2018), won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album at the 61st Grammy Awards in 2019. He was named IBMA Guitar Player of the Year in 2022 and again in 2024, the year the Travelin’ McCourys were Instrumental Group of the Year. He also played on the all-star projects Bluegrass 2020 and Bluegrass 2022 with Scott Vestal.