Shelby Kemp

Guitarist. Singer. Mississippian.

Hello, I'm Shelby Kemp, and I'm a musician based out of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
​
When I got out of school, I didn't really know what to do with myself. I came from a very rural part of the state and did my schooling at a place where any sort of music education program was the furthest thing from most folks minds. I bailed out of there to the next, slightly larger town over and started making music with anyone I could, for anyone who would listen.
​
See, I had grown up loving music. My family was full of good church singers, and my grandfather on my mother's side even played a pretty mean piano, but our familial love of music wasn't something I saw a lot of in other folks around us. When I got my first guitar at the age of 14, I gave up on my feeble attempts to be good at or enjoy sports or math or deer hunting, and I dove into learning all of my favorite songs on that instrument. Most of those songs were from the British rockers of the 60's and 70's.
​
As I dug into that iconic sound from across the Atlantic, I learned about the through-line from my favorite guitarists like Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton that runs straight back across the pond and into my own back yard. Delta Blues, Country Blues, Folk Blues... whatever you want to call it, became my love and my greatest fascination. I learned how to open tune my guitar and started trying to emulate all of my favorite players... Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Mississippi Fred McDowell. It's a pursuit I have maintained into my adult life, and to this day there isn't much in this world I find more fulfilling than waking up and going through a whole pot of coffee trying to work out how to play an old blues tune.

Music has taken me some pretty cool places, and introduced me to some lifelong friends. In 2016 I formed a band called Royal Horses, and we spent the next 6 or 7 years traveling all over the South, playing rock & roll and country and blues tunes in every little dive bar and beach club we could. We all have very busy lives these days, but if you're ever around South Mississippi, be on the lookout for a Royal Horses show. We still have a hell of a lot of fun.

Back in 2020 I was introduced to Eddie Roberts through our mutual friend Chris Spies. I cut a couple of tunes in his studio out in Denver, CO. We finished tracking the songs, bought a case of wine from Trader Joes, and spent the rest of that night playing acoustic guitars with bottle neck slides and trading old delta blues songs. We became fast friends, and the next time I got ready to record a few songs, Eddie offered to build a band around the two of us to cut the tracks.
The Lucky Strokes were born with the addition of Chris Spies on organ, Taylor Galbraith on drums, and Ashley Galbraith on Bass. We cut our first album and began playing shows through December 2023, kicking off 2024 by spending a month on the road opening for Eddie's long time band The New Mastersounds.

I have been blessed with numerous opportunities to travel around the country and the world doing what I love to do, more than I ever dreamed even just a few years ago. From the beautiful forests of Northern California, to the sunny swamps of southern Florida, the snowy mountain ranges of Iceland, and beyond, I've had some truly magical experiences, and made some incredible friends.

While I love to travel and explore and share my passion with people far and wide, there is no place like home.
Hattiesburg, MS is a peaceful little town in a beautiful part of the South, and it is the place where my fiancé, Amanda and I call home, and where we are raising our daughter, Talullah.