“Standing shoulder to shoulder with contemporaries like Gillian Welch and Rhiannon Giddens...folk music harking back to the stripped-down sounds of Leadbelly, Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie.”
— JOHN VAITES [AMERICANA UK]

BIO

Memphis-raised singer-songwriter, Kelly Hunt, paints stories as old and offbeat as her Depression-era tenor banjo and parlor guitar, reimagining traditions of folk & old-time music with innovative vigor. Interweaving poetic lyrics, lilting melodies, and intriguing arrangements, Hunt casts a spell which No Depression describes as “the musical equivalent of a book you can’t put down, one you’ll want to revisit again and again to catch every nuance and turn of phrase.” Hunt’s 2019 debut album, Even The Sparrow, was a finalist for the International Folk Music Awards “Album of the Year.” Her sophomore album, Ozark Symphony, was recorded with Grammy-winning musician & producer Dirk Powell and released on Compass Records in 2023.

On the walls of any local used music shop there hangs a gallery of mysteries. Picked up and handed down across the decades, each instrument contains the imprints and stories of those who have played it before, most of which remain untold. For New Orleans-based songwriter Kelly Hunt, the most intriguing of these stories is the origin of her anonymous calfskin tenor banjo. “I really wasn’t looking for it,” she says, “but I opened up the case and found a note saying, ‘This banjo was played by a man named Ira Tamm in his dog and pony show from 1920 to 1935.’ It was unlike any banjo I’d ever heard…so warm and mellow, with an almost harp-like quality to it, very soulful”—apt words for the Memphis native’s debut album, Even The Sparrow, which was released in May 2019 and nominated for the International Folk Music Awards “2019 Album of the Year.”

The daughter of an opera singer and a saxophonist, Hunt was raised in Memphis, TN amidst a motley mélange of musical influences ranging from Rachmaninov to Joni Mitchell to Mississippi John Hurt. She grew up singing in choirs, poring over poetry books, and writing her own music as a matter of course, first on piano then 5-string banjo. After being introduced to the banjo in college while studying French and visual arts, Hunt began to develop her own improvised style of playing, combining old-time picking styles with the percussive origins of the instrument. After college, Hunt embarked on a rambling path through career pursuits in farming, French breadmaking, and visual arts, ultimately landing in Kansas City, where she would go on to write and record Even the Sparrow.

This debut work displays Hunt’s penchant for storytelling and intriguing arrangement, punctuated by articulate melodies and lyrical deft. While reminiscent of modern traditionalists such as Gillian Welch, Even The Sparrow reveals an ineffable quality that hovers beyond the constraints of genre, à la Anais Mitchell and Patty Griffin. Over the span of a dozen songs, Hunt’s penchant for storytelling and intriguing arrangement cast a spell which No Depression describes as “the musical equivalent of a book you can’t put down, one you’ll want to revisit again and again to catch every nuance and turn of phrase.”

In “Men of Blue & Grey,” what begins as a Reconstruction-era ballad about the repurposing of Civil War glass plate negatives in a greenhouse roof soon becomes a meditation on the hope that growth and life may one day be able to emerge from the ruins of suffering and haunting of violence. “Across The Great Divide” turns an otherwise traditional accounting of spurned love into a philosophical epic of the ethics of forgiveness and freedom, evoking the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard and Walt Whitman.

As for the original owner of Kelly Hunt’s mysterious tenor banjo, not much is known. “I’ve never been able to find anything about Ira Tamm,” she says, “I think he just had a humble little traveling show.” What’s clear is that the itinerant performer laid down his banjo at the height of the Great Depression, almost eighty years before it would be picked up by Hunt. “That banjo has stories. I wish I knew them all,” says Hunt, though the banjo’s most intriguing story may just be beginning with Even The Sparrow. “The marks of Ira’s hands are still in the calfskin head, so I can see where he played and left his mark,” she says. “Now my own marks are there too, in different places, like a kind of portrait.”

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press

“10 Best Country and Americana Songs to Hear Now” — Rolling Stone Country

“20 Best Folk Albums of 2019” — PopMatters

“Kelly Hunt sings with the lilting cadence of a folksinger born somewhere far away, sometime long ago.”

— ROBERT CRAWFORD [ROLLING STONE COUNTRY]

“Uncanny is Hunt’s innate ability to summon the same vigorous energy of classic folk players, all while pushing forward to modernize the instrument’s role in contemporary songwriting...She delivers her lyrics with an earthen frankness that can’t be taught. ”

— Jonathan Frahm [POPMATTERS]

“Once in a while, a musical project comes along that truly captures the spirit of America…Kelly Hunt’s OZARK SYMPHONY does exactly this […] If you’ve ever been enchanted by the lyrical power of Lucinda Williams or felt the emotional tug of Nanci Griffith, then you’re about to meet your next obsession.”

— [GRATEFUL WEB]

“Kelly Hunt weaves an enchanting spell with her atmospheric music [...] Hunt’s vocals draw us in like a siren calling from rough seas, asking us not to dash ourselves on the rocks but to find shelter in her soothing tones.”

— [FOLK ALLEY]

“An ode to authenticity...OZARK SYMPHONY soars.”

— [AMERICAN SONGWRITER]

“[Hunt’s] stories — gut-punching in their truthfulness and beautiful in their imagery, often simultaneously — make her debut album, ‘Even the Sparrow,’ the musical equivalent of a book you can’t put down, one you’ll want to revisit again and again to catch every nuance and turn of phrase.”

— STACY CHANDLER [NO DEPRESSION]

“With her minimalist, almost woody-sounding banjo, and her clear, almost operatic voice, Kelly Hunt has a striking and original sound.”

— John Schaefer [WNYC Soundcheck / Weekly Roundup]

“From the first instant you know you’re in a place where there is no sense of time, where anything can happen and no one will ever have to admit to a thing.”

— Greil Marcus [ROLLING STONE]