Folk duo Pete and Maura Kennedy blend country, bluegrass, Western swing and janglepop in a joyous musical mashup. After well over a million miles of touring during decades of performing and writing, they are masters of encouraging, empowerings songs that pull back against divisions.

Pete and Maura Kennedy know a lot of uplifting songs. During the COVID pandemic, they live-streamed weekly all-request concerts from their New York apartment. Over three years of livestreams, they performed well over a thousand songs, with only a handful of repeats.

“After such a deep dive into American roots music, we felt like we had a new set of writing tools. We were ready to create this body of work, and there’s just SO much to write about,” says Maura.

“During our five-year hiatus from writing and recording, America changed in massive ways, divisive ways that have shaken our whole foundation. That has to be addressed by creative artists, those of us who have a voice to speak for others. Our love of the great things about this country, things that are under threat, is the reason we decided to make ‘Headwinds’ the title track of the CD [which they released in September 2023]. Political and social headwinds are making it hard to get back ‘home’ to our greatness as a nation. We want to push back in a positive way against those winds.”

In addition to singing and writing, Pete and Maura are multi-instrumentalists. On Headwinds, acoustic and electric guitars, a vintage steel guitar, a gospel-inflected piano/organ mix, and even a slide ukulele all add colors to a songbag of sounds that have drawn us together during hard times. Pete and Maura believe that those sounds still have the power to pull us through again.

The Kennedys began their writing and touring life three decades ago as members of Nanci Griffith’s Blue Moon Orchestra, developing their own sound as a frequent support act on Nanci’s tours across America, Ireland, Scotland and England. Along the way, they hosted a nationwide radio program, “The Dharma Cafe” on Sirius/XM, wrote and released sixteen CDs of original music, and have been core artists on folk radio, expanding their audience further with the inception of the AAA and Americana formats.