The Kentucky Headhunters are a country rock and Southern rock band from Edmonton, Kentucky — one of the most genuinely organic stories in American roots music, a family band whose origins trace back to a practice house on a 700-acre farm in Metcalfe County that has been in the Young family since the Revolutionary War. Brothers Richard Young and Fred Young grew up on that land, surrounded by a musical landscape that included black sharecroppers singing gospel, younger white farmhands playing Johnny Cash, their father's big band records, and their mother's blues radio station. Their cousins Anthony Kenney and Greg Martin — Martin having relocated from Louisville to Edmonton — joined them, and the four formed a band called Itchy Brother in 1968, named after Fred's favorite cartoon character from the television show King Leonardo and His Short Subjects. Itchy Brother played the clubs and festivals of Kentucky and the surrounding South for over a decade, achieving regional success including the song Shotgun Effie, based on the brothers' grandmother. The band dissolved in 1982.
In 1986, Martin and the Young brothers reformed under the name The Kentucky Headhunters, adding brothers Ricky Lee Phelps on lead vocals and harmonica and Doug Phelps on bass. They began hosting a monthly radio program on WLOC-FM in Munfordville, Kentucky, playing their freewheeling blend of country, blues, boogie, and Southern rock to local audiences. Nashville producer Harold Shedd — who had worked with Alabama and K.T. Oslin — signed them to Mercury/PolyGram and made the unusual decision to give the band complete artistic control over their recording. He reportedly visited the studio once for five minutes. The resulting debut album Pickin' on Nashville (1989) was self-produced by the band and became one of the most surprising successes in country music of its era. It produced four consecutive top 40 country singles: Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine (a Bill Monroe cover), Dumas Walker, Oh Lonesome Me (a Don Gibson cover that reached number eight), and Rock 'n' Roll Angel. The album was certified double platinum by the RIAA.
The awards that followed reflected just how completely Pickin' on Nashville had broken through. The band won the Grammy Award for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal in 1991. They took the Academy of Country Music Award for Top New Vocal Group in 1990. The Country Music Association named them Vocal Group of the Year in both 1990 and 1991, and Album of the Year in 1990. A second Mercury album, Electric Barnyard (1991), was less commercially successful, and the Phelps brothers departed to form their own group, Brother Phelps. The Headhunters regrouped with Kenney and a rotating cast of vocalists and have continued releasing albums and touring ever since, accumulating ten studio albums, three compilations, three CMA Awards, and over eleven million total sales across their catalog. In 2005 they recorded two albums with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame pianist Johnnie Johnson, the man who discovered Chuck Berry.
Wayne Dennon photographed the Kentucky Headhunters as part of an archive that valued music made by people who earned it the slow way — years of playing small rooms before anyone outside Kentucky knew their name. They are a band of genuine character, born out of a farm community and shaped by every kind of American music that reached those hills, and the loose, joyful, gut-bucket energy they brought to Nashville in 1989 reminded the industry of what it had been missing.
