Biography
Born on 1 June 1941 in Greenwood, Arkansas, USA, Kemp grew up with a father who worked as a motor mechanic. During his teenage years he competed behind the wheel of racing cars before shifting his focus to music. He assembled his own group and took it on the road throughout the south-west. Songwriting success arrived in 1963 after George Jones scored a major hit with “Love Bug.” Kemp’s own Decca Records version of “The Image Of Me” attracted scant attention, yet Conway Twitty’s rendition climbed to number 5 on the country chart. Twitty went on to enjoy further strong results with three more Kemp compositions: “Next In Line,” “Darling You Know I Wouldn’t Lie,” and “That’s When She Started To Stop Loving You.” Kemp himself first entered the charts in 1969 when “Won’t You Come Home” appeared on Decca. Over the next thirteen years, releases on MCA, United Artists Records, and Mercury Records yielded twenty additional chart entries, of which only “Honky Tonk Wine” (1973) reached the Top 20. A modest 1983 single on Door Knob, “Don’t Send Me No Angels,” later found success in versions by Ricky Van Shelton and George Jones. Kemp continues to supply emotionally direct, hard-country material of the sort he once described as “tears in ma beer” songs. His final appearance on the charts came in 1986 with the duet “Red Neck And Over Thirty,” recorded alongside Bobby G. Rice.