Pete Kuykendall
Musician · 1938–2017 · Washington, D.C.
Best known for
Banjo
Songwriter
Peter Van “Pete” Kuykendall was a banjo player, songwriter, and discographer who did more to document and dignify bluegrass than almost anyone of his generation, chiefly as co-founder and longtime editor of Bluegrass Unlimited, the magazine widely called “the bible of bluegrass.” A Washington–area fixture from the music’s formative years, he wore nearly every hat the genre offered—player, producer, engineer, publisher, festival promoter, and institution-builder.
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- Born January 15, 1938, in Washington, D.C., and raised in Arlington, Virginia, he was the son of a piano teacher and played clarinet in his junior-high and high-school concert bands; an avid record collector from a young age, he soaked up country and bluegrass over Washington radio stations such as WARL, WGAY, and WWVA. He learned all the bluegrass instruments—banjo, fiddle, mandolin, bass, and guitar—with the five-string as his primary instrument, and was named National Banjo Champion in 1956.
- He cut his teeth in Washington-area outfits including the Log Cabin Boys and the husband-and-wife act Benny & Vallie Cain, played banjo with The Country Gentlemen in 1958–1959, and worked with Red Allen, Frank Wakefield & the Kentuckians in 1962; he performed as “Pete Roberts” because the Cains found his Dutch surname hard to pronounce.
- He composed a string of enduring bluegrass numbers—“Down Where the Still Waters Flow,” “Journey’s End,” “No Blind Ones There,” “Out on the Ocean,” “Remembrance of You,” and “Rollin’ Stone.”
- His song “I Am Weary (Let Me Rest)” reached a vast audience on the multi-platinum, Grammy Album of the Year soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), performed by the Cox Family.
- In the late 1950s he published pioneering articles and discographies in Disc Collector—early catalog work on the recordings of Bill Monroe, Reno and Smiley, Flatt and Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers—leading scholar Neil V. Rosenberg to call him “the first discographer of bluegrass music.”
- He established the Wynwood Music publishing company in the early 1960s and built Wynwood Recording Studio in the basement of his Falls Church, Virginia, home, where he engineered sessions for blues and bluegrass artists—including recording Mississippi John Hurt—and produced Country Gentlemen albums such as Nashville Jail (1964).
- In 1966 he co-founded Bluegrass Unlimited with Gary Henderson, Dick Freeland, Dick Spottswood, and Dianne and Vince Sims, launching it as a typed, mimeographed newsletter that grew into a glossy, internationally read monthly.
- He became the magazine’s editor in 1970 and ran it as editor and general manager for nearly four decades; contemporaries credited it with spreading the word and lifting bluegrass out of the bars during a lean period for the music.
- From 1972 to 1980 he promoted the Indian Springs Bluegrass Festival near Hagerstown, Maryland, staging the event some seventeen times and helping make the Washington, D.C., region a national bluegrass hub.
- He was instrumental in founding the International Bluegrass Music Association in 1985 and the International Bluegrass Music Museum in 1991, two of the genre’s central institutions.
- Kuykendall was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 1996 in recognition of his broad, foundational service to the music.
- He died August 24, 2017, at a nursing facility in Warrenton, Virginia, at age 79.
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Red AllenPlayed on recordings with Red Allen
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Red Allen and Frank WakefieldPlayed on recordings with Red Allen and Frank Wakefield
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The Country GentlemenPlayed on recordings with The Country Gentlemen
