Pete Kennedy
Pete Kennedy is a guitarist, singer and songwriter from the Washington, D.C., area who played in Nanci Griffith’s Blue Moon Orchestra from 1991 to 1993 and has since performed and recorded with his wife, Maura Kennedy, as the Kennedys. Before that he spent years as a freelance guitarist in Washington, on stage and in the studio.
He grew up in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington. There he played in a guitar duo with Charlie Byrd and worked with Danny Gatton, whom he calls his guitar mentor, did studio work for Bias Recorders and Rounder Records, and backed performers such as Eartha Kitt, Bob Hope, Martha and the Vandellas and the Fifth Dimension. He won several Washington Area Music Awards, among them Artist of the Year and Musician of the Year. His first albums under his own name were Rhythm Ranch and Bound for Glory (both 1985), followed by Highway 10 (1991) and two in 1992, Channel 3 and Shearwater: The Art of the Unplugged Guitar.
His Rounder work included Hazel Dickens, Carol Elizabeth Jones and Ginny Hawker’s Heart of a Singer (Rounder, 1998), recorded at Lion and Fox in Alexandria, Virginia, on which he played rhythm and lead guitar throughout, with Barry Mitterhoff on mandolin and Marshall Wilborn on bass. Dudley Connell added a second guitar on Dickens’s “I Can’t Find Your Love Anymore,” cut in December 1997.
Kennedy also toured with Mary Chapin Carpenter during her years on Columbia Records, and in 1991 he joined Griffith’s band. He met Maura in Austin, Texas, in 1992, and she joined Griffith’s band as a harmony singer; the two started out as a duo opening for Griffith on her tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland. Their albums as the Kennedys run from River of Fallen Stars (Green Linnet, 1995) and Life Is Large (Green Linnet, 1996) through Angel Fire (Philo, 1998), Evolver (Rounder, 2000), Stand (Koch, 2003) and three on Appleseed, Half a Million Miles (2005), Songs of the Open Road (2006) and Better Dreams (2008), to a run on their own label that includes Closer Than You Know (2012), Dance a Little Closer: The Kennedys Sing the Songs of Nanci Griffith (2014), West (2015), Safe Until Tomorrow (2018) and Headwinds (2023). In 2001 the World Folk Music Association gave them its Kate Wolf Memorial Award.
He has produced the Kennedys’ albums and, in 2012, Griffith’s Intersection and the tribute album Trouble in the Fields. In late 2006 he and Maura formed the Strangelings, a folk-rock band built around his electric sitar, with Chris and Meredith Thompson. His later solo albums include Guitarslinger (2008), Tone, Twang, and Taste (2014), Heart of Gotham (2015) and Electric Sitar Meditations (2020). Besides electric and acoustic guitar he plays bass, drums, electric sitar, twelve-string, ukulele, mandolin and banjo.
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Hazel Dickens, Carol Elizabeth Jones and Ginny HawkerPlayed on recording with Hazel Dickens, Carol Elizabeth Jones and Ginny Hawker
