Billy Kemp

Through his wide-ranging collaborations as a musician, performer, arranger, producer and composer with artists ranging from Johnny Cash to The Band, on stages from the Grand Ole Opry to the Kennedy Center, with venues from the American Visionary Art Museum to the Baltimore City Detention Center, Billy Kemp has had an extraordinarily diverse musical life.

His theme music has been used for Emmy-award winning Maryland Public Television’s Outdoors Maryland since 1998. He was a music facilitator at the Baltimore City Detention Center from 1999-2005 producing numerous concerts of new original compositions by himself and the residents. He taught at the University of Maryland Baltimore County from 1995-2005. From 2006-2016 he composed, recorded and toured with the Appalachian-Folk duo, Jeni & Billy, an exploration in Old, Weird America. In 2017 Billy moved to the edge of the Cumberland Plateau an hour, east of Nashville, where he lives and makes music with his wife and banjoist/singer, Sue Griffiths and their cat, Minnie and their dog, Mavis.

He was born in 1954 and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. He first learned piano at six from his mother. At the age of ten in elementary school he studied coronet and at thirteen began a life-long friendship and study with the guitar. He played in rock, folk-rock and country music bands starting in his early twenties for nearly thirty years. He studied music composition at the University of Maryland with Stuart Saunders Smith where he graduated in 1995. He is a composer of songs, television, solo, chamber and orchestral music.