James Kee

James Kee is from Chattanooga and moved to Nashville in 2016. He studied environmental science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and has been self-employed since he was a kid mowing lawns.

He wanted a residency

What Kee wanted in Nashville was a standing gig in a bar. He got one at Dee's Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison, and it ran on Monday nights for about seven years. The players were people he already knew from jamming around town. By 2019 four had settled in: Kee on mandolin, Harry Clark on guitar, Cory Walker on banjo, Maddie Denton on fiddle.

"It wasn't an accident that we got together, but it certainly seemed like an accident that it turned into a full-time profession for us."

Getting it off the ground was slow. Every time the band gained traction, somebody new and famous hired one of his bandmates away. They started a record in early 2020 and finished it over that year because there was nothing else to do. Kee calls the first album aimless, in its songs and in its plan. It came out in 2021.

Tennessee stayed relatively open through the pandemic, so the band kept gathering and broadcasting. Nobody realized how far those livestreams were carrying until touring resumed and the name had reached places they had never played.

By 2022 the goal was clear. Make the band everybody's first priority. That took until 2025, when nobody had another artist's schedule to work around and the weekend runs turned into two and three week tours. East Nash Grass won IBMA New Artist of the Year in 2024. Kee does not chase awards. Being nominated alongside his peers, he says, is enough.

Mandolin to guitar

Kee plays mandolin on the first East Nash Grass record, which surprises people who only know the band since. In 2021 a one-off band assembled for a party in Idaho asked him and Harry Clark to trade instruments for the night. Both liked it. It stuck.

"I often joke that I'm the worst guitar player in the band."

Guitar was his first instrument, but East Nash Grass was the first professional job he ever had playing it. Everything before was mandolin. The switch suited a lead singer. He could step up to the microphone and steer a band of substitutes through songs they did not know, which he had to do often while the others were out on the road. Clark's mandolin fit the sound better, and Kee never wanted to switch back.

The band turned all that versatility into a bit. On stage they call it special game. Everybody swaps instruments, to varying degrees of success.

Earl's D-18

The connection runs back a generation. Kee's grandfather played banjo, learned Earl's style out of his book, and met him more than once in Nashville, including at a banjo contest Earl was judging at Rivergate Mall in about 1984. Kee still has his grandfather's Earl Scruggs model banjo, number 179 of the 1,984 built that year.

The guitar is a 1955 Martin D-18. Don Gibson bought it new and had Shot Jackson thin the neck, fit a truss rod and add the oversized pickguard that makes it recognizable in the black and white Martha White broadcasts. Earl Scruggs bought it from Gibson in 1957 and played it the rest of his life.

Kee knew it was for sale and sitting at Gruhn Guitars, in poor playing condition, which he thinks is what kept other buyers away. He went down one Saturday and played it for an hour. Above the fifth fret it had a resonance he had not expected, and it explained why Earl worked so high up the neck with a capo.

"I knew I would regret it. I thought that it should be played."

The restoration finished in spring 2025, big pickguard and truss rod cover back in place. Kee's deadline was East Nash Grass's own night at the Ryman Auditorium on July 15, 2025, their first as headliners after three opening slots, shared with AJ Lee & Blue Summit. Cory Walker played the restored guitar on stage that night.

"One day I'll be dead and gone, and this guitar will still be out there."

He does not intend to keep it in a closet. He will fly with it if he has to buy it a seat.

Wildflowers instead of lawns

The other thing is land. He built the boyhood lawn mowing into a Chattanooga landscaping company. Now he manages about 900 acres around Nashville with a small crew, and everything he has learned points one direction. Mow less.

"I don't know what it is with mankind's obsession with things that are neat and even and tidy."

Where ground is hard to reach, or does not need mowing at all, he plants it. Managed grassland in the rural spots, hay where hay makes sense, food plots for deer and turkey, and wildflowers where people will see them. One property keeps bees, and the beekeepers keep asking for more flowers. He experiments every year with pollen-heavy clovers, sunflowers, zinnias and goldenrod. After seeding he waters once and leaves them alone. In a drought summer the trees go brown and the flowers keep blooming.

The tall orange cosmos have become a signature of the properties he manages. The hardest part, he says as a former landscaper, is keeping crews from weed eating the seedlings before anyone knows what they are. He does not ever want to grow grass again. Being outside through four full seasons, he says, is where a lot of his reason to play music comes from.

After East Nash Grass

In April 2026 Kee stepped out of the East Nash Grass touring lineup after nearly a decade. Frank Rische took the guitar chair, and Kee stays involved off the road. In September 2026 he signed with Mountain Home Music Company for his first solo record, built around the restored D-18 and a list of guest players.

He co-founded the Wednesday bluegrass night at American Legion Post 82 in Nashville, and he has sat in with Randy Steele and the High Cold Wind.