James Kee

Musician · Signal Mountain, Tennessee
Best known for Guitar Lead Vocals Mandolin

James Kee is a singer, guitarist and mandolin player from Signal Mountain, Tennessee, who co-founded the Nashville band East Nash Grass and was its guitarist, a main lead singer and one of its chief songwriters for nearly a decade. The band was named the IBMA’s New Artist of the Year in 2024, and in March 2026 Kee announced that he would leave it at the end of April.

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He sang in church, school and local choirs as a boy on Signal Mountain, above Chattanooga. His grandfather, who played banjo and guitar, introduced him to bluegrass in 1997, when Kee was nine, at the Mountain Opry, a free Friday-night show at the old Walden’s Ridge Civic Center, and by 1999 he was playing guitar. He came up through the Chattanooga scene, including the Three Sisters Festival, and played with NewTown and with the Hamilton County Ramblers, a Chattanooga band in which he played mandolin and sang lead alongside the guitarist Roy Curry, the fiddler John Boulware and the banjo player Jim Pankey; the Ramblers issued a self-titled album in 2015. He has named the mandolinist Wayne Benson and the singer Russell Moore, both of IIIrd Tyme Out, as his main influences.

After moving to Nashville he became a regular at the Monday-night bluegrass shows at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison, where East Nash Grass took shape from 2017; in his telling the lineup had settled by about 2018, with Maddie Denton on fiddle, and the band turned serious in 2019, when Cory Walker on banjo and Harry Clark on mandolin joined full time. In 2018 he and Evan Winsor also started Bluegrass Wednesday Nights at American Legion Post 82 in East Nashville, which he hosted. On the band’s first album, East Nash Grass (Lamb Lyfe, July 2021), Kee played guitar and sang most of the leads, among them “Time at Hand,” “Ridin’ the Lines” and “Kitten and the Cat.” Last Chance to Win (Mountain Fever, August 2023) has him singing “Love Slippin’ Away” and “How Could I Love Her So Much” and includes his song “I Almost Told Her”; it reached number four on Billboard’s bluegrass chart, and the band won New Artist of the Year the following year. All God’s Children followed on Mountain Fever in 2025.

On other people’s records Kee has mostly played mandolin. He sang lead on Buck Owens’s “Hello Trouble” and the Delmore Brothers’ “I Don’t Know Why,” with Tim O’Brien on harmony, on the fiddler Bronwyn Keith-Hynes’s Fiddler’s Pastime (2020); played mandolin throughout Maddie Denton’s Playin’ in This Town (2021), singing “Hope You Hang Around”; and was the mandolinist, with Sam Bush, on Rick Lang’s A Tale to Tell (Dark Shadow, 2022), where he sang lead on “Lost Town.”

In his March 2026 announcement Kee said he was stepping away from the stage but would keep working with East Nash Grass behind the scenes.

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