Peggy Ott's Blues Review
Interview with Kelley Hunt
7/14/2001 - at the Kalamazoo Blues Festival
Kelley Hunt is one busy woman! Her tour dates this summer included 13 performances in June and 15 in July, including blues festivals in places as diverse as Ruidoso, NM; Monterey, CA; Victoria, BC; Portland, OR; Windosr, ON; Interlochen, MI; Quincy, IL; and Sioux Falls, SD. She will return to Kalamazoo on August 11, 2001, to perform at the Lamplighter Inn.
This roots R&B singer, songwriter, piano player, and bandleader is an ackowledged minority in the world of blues. She's a woman, she's white, she doesn't play guitar, and she's from Kansas! This doesn't slow her down one bit. She also performs only her own music, but she says, "I think when I go out, many times I am what appears to be a novelty at first. Once we start to play, people forget that it's a woman band or whatever and so far its been great! It hasn't been a problem at all." In fact, Kelley quite often out-does other performers in CD sales at these festivals. I can tell you that the line to buy her CD's was quite long at the KBF, and the staff had to bring out an extra case to satisfy demand.
When asked, Kelley said what she thought would be the hardest place to play turned ot to be not hard at all. This was the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally last year near Mt. Rushmore. With 58,000 bikers at the rally, she was the only woman on the bill, playing right before Cheap Tricks on Saturday night. "They went nuts," Kelley said. "Those men and women were from all around the world and they were very respectful, really nice, and they KNOW how to show appreciation." - that in reference to the practice of riding up to the stage and revving their bikes to applaud.
Her biggest musical influences? Her mother (also a professional singer) and her grandmother; and also Ruth Brown, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, Professor Longhair, Ann Peebles, Aretha Franlkin, and Johnnie Johnson. She calls herself "a very aggressive" piano player, which is no lie! The keyboard would have bounced off the stage during her performance at the KBF if it hadn't been weighted down. It's impossible to sit still when she bangs out one of her boogie-woogie tunes! Kelley has been playing since she was 3, finally learning to read music when she was 10.
Her introduction to singing with a band came by accident, when she was 18 and the singer in the band didn't show up one night. The other members of the band crossed their fingers and hoped she could sing. She ended up replacing the other singer and has been singing and playing ever since.
Kelley's CD's are Kelley Hunt (1994), and Inspiration (2000). Both are on the 88 Records label. Inspiration is a live CD, featuring concert arrangements of her work. The ballad, Love Never Dies, was taken from a broadcast of Garrison Keillor's public radio show "A Prairie Home Companion". Both CD's contain only her own original material.
It was a pleasure to see this artist perform, and equally pleasurable interviewing her. Check her out at her web site: www.kelleyhunt.com.
