Kenny Smith

Musician · b. 1967 · Nine Mile, Indiana · kennysmithguitar.com · Also a recording artist
Best known for Guitar

Kenny Smith is the flatpicker whose clean, melody-first guitar became the tonal signature of the Lonesome River Band’s most imitated years, and who has spent the quarter-century since leading a band with his wife, Amanda, and turning up on other people’s records when a producer wants the guitar part played exactly right. His playing owes more to Norman Blake’s melodic logic than to the speed contest — every note placed, the rhythm hand as celebrated as the lead — and it has made him one of the most studied acoustic guitarists of his generation.

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  • Born September 19, 1967, in Nine Mile, Indiana, into a fiddling family — his father and grandfather both played — he started on guitar at four and was drilled on rhythm fundamentals long before he was turned loose on lead.
  • He worked up his fiddle-tune vocabulary from Norman Blake’s records, the source of the deliberate, singing phrasing that still marks his solos.
  • Indiana was a long way from the music’s southern heartland, and the early grounding in rhythm shows: among guitarists his backup — the bass runs, the placement behind a singer, the refusal to crowd a vocal — is studied as closely as his lead breaks.
  • On the contest circuit he placed second in the MerleFest flatpicking competition in 1991 and won it in 1992.
  • He turned professional in 1993 with Claire Lynch and the Front Porch String Band.
  • In 1996 he joined the Lonesome River Band, replacing Tim Austin alongside Sammy Shelor, Ronnie Bowman and Don Rigsby — the lineup behind One Step Forward (1996), Finding the Way (1998) and Talkin’ to Myself (2000), all three drawn on in this catalog.
  • He was named IBMA Guitar Player of the Year twice during those Lonesome River years, the awards that moved him from admired sideman to the guitarist a generation of players copied.
  • His solo debut Studebaker (Sugar Hill, 1997) arrived mid-tenure and became a flatpicking reference record; he followed it with Return in 2011.
  • He left the band in 2001 and married Amanda, whom he had met at a Lonesome River Band show; the Kenny and Amanda Smith Band took the IBMA Emerging Artist of the Year award in 2003.
  • The band’s albums run from Slowly but Surely (2001) through House Down the Block (2004), Always Never Enough (2005), Tell Someone (2007), Live and Learn (2008), Catch Me If I Try (2012) and Unbound (2016), with Amanda’s lead singing out front and his guitar arranging the space around it.
  • In 2015 he co-founded Band of Ruhks with his old bandmates Don Rigsby and Ronnie Bowman, a reunion of the singers and player who had defined the Lonesome River sound a generation earlier.
  • As a session and guest player he appears on Don Rigsby’s A Vision (1998), Ashby Frank’s First Crossing (1999), Marty Raybon’s Southern Roots and Branches (2012), John Cowan’s John Duffey tribute Epilogue (2018), and three cuts on the Louvin-to-Osborne survey Industrial Strength Bluegrass (2021).
  • He has taught widely since the instructional DVD Tunes and Techniques (2004), and in 2017 launched kennysmithguitar.com, now a subscription video school covering rhythm, improvisation and fundamentals.
  • He has played the same 1935 Martin D-18 since 1995 — the instrument most listeners are actually hearing on the Lonesome River records — and also works a ladder-braced 1948 Regal jumbo; his name is on a Blue Chip signature pick.
  • In 2026 he cut the guitar duet “Three Star Hornpipe” with Bryan Sutton for Sutton’s From Roots to Branches, two of the era’s most-copied flatpickers trading a fiddle tune.
  • He lives in Lebanon, Tennessee, with Amanda and their daughter Annabelle.

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