Still Strumming at 92

Still Strumming at 92

In the hills of Tennessee, where some folks live between Difficult and Defeated, lives a man who’s anything but.

Cordell Kemp, himself a resident of Difficult (pop. 250), just might be an unheralded national treasure, for there’s music stored within the lively 92-year-old that’s all but vanished. He carries on with old-time mountain songs that have never been recorded—tunes he learned by heart and plays by ear on his well-worn banjo.

“When I was young, I played every Saturday night till the crows started calling out to the morning sun,” he says. He learned to play by watching his grandfather, father, and uncles when he was 8 or 9.

As a teenager, Kemp became an ardent fan of Grand Ole Opry legend Uncle Dave Macon. Whenever the master showman performed anywhere near Kemp’s hometown, the boy would carefully study Uncle Dave’s trademark tricks of slinging and twirling his banjo. If Uncle Dave spent the night at someone’s home, Kemp would ride his mule over and ask for a little coaching.

In time, he became a local favorite, providing entertainment for all sorts of local functions. “One time I got a hundred dollars,” he marvels, although often his payment was just food and drink.

Today, Kemp, known to many as Paw, can still play a pretty mean banjo, scuff up the floor with his signature buck dance move called a “rocking chair step,” and sing songs that hardly anyone else even recalls.

“All the girls like a musician,” he says with a twinkle in his bright blue eyes. Then he jokes that he’s on the hunt for a lady companion—“50 on down”—since his wife of 68 years passed away two years ago.

Loving the limelight, he’s a regular at local music events and even spent a week at the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tenn., where he entertained more than 10,000 people. His repertoire is seemingly endless with standards such as Cripple Creek, Cotton-Eyed Joe, and Little Bird mixed in with his own lighthearted tunes.

At least once or twice a week, Kemp drives to Bill Powell’s tire store in nearby Defeated (pop. 450) to chew the fat with the regulars who sit next to the garage.

“Man, he’s got tales,” laughs Powell, who became one of Kemp’s closest friends nearly 30 years ago. Every Sunday morning he picks up Kemp for their weekly commute to Red Boiling Springs (pop. 1,023) where they fill jugs with sulfur water, which they firmly believe contributes to their health.

“People think the reason that he’s in such great shape is that he’s never worked,” Powell teases. In truth, Kemp has been a farmer, ginseng harvester, factory worker, and custodian—but nothing holds a candle to picking the banjo.

“He sings to himself all day,” Powell says. “A lot of times, he sits on the front porch and plays, hoping someone will see him and stop.”

Indeed, Kemp has welcomed in a number of visitors, including well-known pickers Marty Stuart, LeRoy Troy, David Holt, and John Hartford. They come to listen to his music and stories, and to study his unique methods of combining three styles of banjo-playing, which he describes as “rolling, crawling, and flailing.” Those maneuvers might best be described as fingerpicking, strumming, and flipping the whole instrument like a pancake.

If you’ve seen the music video for country up-and-comer Elbert West’s song Diddley, you’ve seen Kemp, picking and dancing in his television debut. He was “discovered” by West’s record producer Scott Miller, who lives in the community and is advancing a one-man campaign to capture Kemp’s music in a documentary.

“I can’t think of anyone personally who predates all facets of our industry and still has the ability to perform it in its original, untainted form. He doesn’t have any outside influences. All the music he knows was played live around a campfire or a shady porch,” says Miller, an admitted champion of the underdog.

“I’ve wanted to take him into a studio and record him, but he doesn’t understand what that means. I wish there was some way that I could get the funding to take a film crew and catch him in his own environment, sitting there on his porch and playing all these songs.”

Kemp’s in no hurry. He speculates he might live quite a while longer.

“I thought I might live to be 969 like Methuselah,” he says, that twinkle in his eyes re-igniting. “You know, history repeats itself.”

Michael Nolan is a regular contributor to American Profile.

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