Shepherd's Early Days
How did Shepherd get involved with the blues in the first place? "I grew up in a musical household," he says. "My dad was in radio, so I grew up listening to all kinds of music, going to all kinds of concerts...my first concert, when I was three years old, was Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. I think that I was hooked from that point forward. I went to all the concerts that came through town, and got to meet all the musicians over the years, and it really influenced the kind of music that I was into. My dad was a big blues fan, and he had a huge record collection of every blues artist that you could think of...I'd go through his collection, and learn how to play one note at a time."
"My first time on stage was when I was thirteen years old, down on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. The blues player Bryan Lee let me get up on stage with him for the first time...I was real nervous when I went on, I'd never been on stage before, but I figured out after that that I could actually do something with this. I got up there and I got my first standing ovation; they wouldn't let me get down, they wanted me to keep playing. I thought, 'this is kind of fun, I might be able to do this'."
Ledbetter Heights
For Shepherd, the New Orleans experience turned out to be a sort of "coming out" party for the young guitarist. "It was not very long after that I went into the studio and recorded my first demo when I was fourteen," he says. "I put my first band together when I was fifteen, and by the time I was sixteen I had signed my record deal." A videotape of Shepherd performing had come to the attention of Giant Records head Irving Azoff, who quickly offered the guitarist a deal. "There's no better explanation other than it was just meant to be," he says. "A lot of people move to Nashville or Los Angeles or New York for a career in music, but I signed with a major record label living in Shreveport, Louisiana."
"People considered me a child prodigy," Shepherd remembers, "and I guess it was unique for somebody my age to be playing the blues. There was a big buzz that started to spread across the country about me, and it reached to the West Coast and New York, and the next thing I knew all these record companies were calling, the phone was ringing off the hook, they were all trying to sign me." After signing with Giant, Shepherd recorded his debut album Ledbetter Heights while he was still in high school. "I was just doing what I love to do, which is play music," he says. "I didn't really know where this was going to go, and I certainly didn't know that it was going to turn into as big a deal as it has. I was just doing what came naturally, going with my gut. Thank the Lord that people liked what they heard. My first single, "Deja Voodoo," came out and went straight up the charts, Ledbetter Heights went platinum. My next album, Trouble Is..., did even better; we've had a lot of success on radio, got a lot of airplay."
The Blues Generation
Shepherd was part of a blues generation that yielded three great young talents in Joe Bonamassa, Jonny Lang, and Shepherd. Does the guitarist have any ideas on how three teenaged blues guitarists managed to all come of prominence within a three-year span in the mid-1990s? "I think that there was something bigger going on there," he says, "it was a time in which new life was being breathed into the music. It's kind of coincidence that we all came up at the same time, and we've all had a decent amount of success, and we're all still doing it." Shepherd feels that this sort of convergence is all part of the evolution of the blues. "There's always going to be new life brought into the blues…as more generations of players are born, they're going to bring their own influence into the music, their own style, and it will continue to evolve. I welcome all that, I think that it's good for the music, it's good for all of us."
At 33 years old, Shepherd realizes that his guitar-driven blues-rock sound doesn't appeal to every blues fan, but he greatly appreciates the fans that he's brought on board during his already lengthy career. "What we do isn't traditional blues, we mix a lot of rock and blues together," says Shepherd. "The fans that we've acquired, I believe, are fans for life. That's a real testament to the kind of music that we do, and to the fans themselves. If you have fans like that, it can enable you to have a life-long career. You look at somebody like B.B. King, he's in his 80s and still playing every night. Nowadays, you're doing good if you have a music career that lasts more than five years, and I've been doing it since 1993. I thank my fans for that!" (Kenny Wayne Shepherd phone interview, September 23, 2010)
