Growing up on a musical diet of his father’s blues, soul and rock record collection, Shepherd began playing guitar age seven after meeting Stevie Ray Vaughan. He learned his craft through stopping and starting old cassette tapes, and teaching himself one note at a time, later playing along with his father’s records. At the age of 13, Shepherd was invited to play on stage with bluesman Brian Lee for a period of several hours, after which he was determined to pursue a career in music.
Using his father’s know-how and industry contacts, Shepherd signed with major-label Giant Records, who released his debut album “Ledbetter Heights” in 1995. The album was instantly popular, sold over half-a-million copies by early 1996 and exposed the singer-songwriter to a wave of new audiences. Combining the southern blues of Texas and Louisiana, as well as acoustic and rockin’ blues, “Ledbetter Heights” earned commercial success that’s known to be particularly rare within the blues genre.
In 1998, Shepherd's sophomore album “Trouble Is…” arrived, earning the songwriter a Grammy nomination, and was followed by “Live On” in 1999. Both albums have since been platinum certified and topped the U.S. Blues Chart. The album “The Place You’re In” was released in 2004 through Reprise Records, and was succeeded by the album and film “10 Days Out: Blues from the Backroads”, which documents several veteran blues players in the American south.
Shepherd’s first live album “Live! in Chicago” (2010) was the guitarist’s fourth album to hit the top spot on the U.S. Blues Chart and even made inroads into the U.S. Rock Chart. The same year Shepherd appeared with Jimmy Fallon’s house band for an entire show, playing the same stratocaster Jimi Hendrix had played at Woodstock.
Returning to the studio the songwriter and guitarist released his first proper album in seven years, 2011’s “How I Go”. It an attempt to capture some of the magic of his earlier albums, Shepherd re-enlisted the help of vocalist Noah Hunt and Talking Head’s keyboardist Jerry Harrison. “Goin’ Home” was released in 2014 and proved to be the musician’s highest charting album, reaching No. 25 on the Billboard 200 and again topping the U.S. Blues Chart.
If you’re born with a name like Kenny Wayne Shepherd, you’re probably only ever going to grow up to become a blues rock musician; that’s certainly how it proved with the man from Shreveport, Louisiana, who signed his first record deal at the tender age of just thirteen and has been a staple of the charts in his native U.S. since 1995, when he was eighteen years old. His musical style runs the gamut between blues rock and hard rock, and that’s something that’s reflected in his hugely energetic live shows; Shepherd is a rocker at heart and proves it with some terrific guitar playing and a voice that sounds just as good on stage as on record, but as the years have rolled by, his gigs have increasingly come to represent Shepherd as a musician; there’s stripped-back acoustic songs, blues classics and occasionally aggressive all-out rock, all in the space of a couple of hours. Accordingly, Shepherd maintains a cult following on both sides of the Atlantic; he’s one of his genre’s biggest talents.
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