Kent Mayhew began playing guitar at the age of seven while living in Houston, Texas. Within a year he began writing his own songs. His family moved to Kentucky when Kent started the third grade, and he played for his first major audience at the Bowling Green Kentucky Fair when he was 10 years old. Although he was too young to get through the front door, Kent’s first bands where playing in clubs by the time he was sixteen years old. It was then he gained acceptance into the Blair School of Music in Nashville and moved there during his junior year in High School. Kent visited his family in Florida the following year, and once Kent saw the palm trees and sugar white sand of Clearwater Beach, his only image of Nashville was in his rear view mirror of his car.

Kent was the lead singer for several Florida bands. It was in these bands where Kent perfected his songwriting and singing while touring the United States. Kent restarted his career as a solo artist singing in many venues in the Tampa Bay area. He developed a cult-like following called the Cowboy’s and the Clowns that – even now – come to hear Kent play when he returns to Florida.

Kent came to Austin, Texas to visit his father and grandmother in the spring of 1997, during Austin’s SXSW Music Conference. The following year, he attended SXSW, and that is when he decided to lay his entire music career on a roll of the dice, and he moved to Austin in the fall of 1999. His love for the water has built him a respectable following among the clubs that grace the shores of Austin’s lakes and gained him popularity in many of the better-known Austin venues. With his family roots in Austin going back to the 1800’s, Kent’s music is a true blend of Texas Country and Americana. He has often been compared to the likes of Jerry Jeff Walker and Jimmy Buffett. It is not unusual at one of Kent’s performances to see a crowd dressed in Hawaiian shirts, wearing docksiders, and dancing next to a bunch of cowboys and cowgirls dressed in western hats and cowboy boots. These two unlikely lifestyles are blended together into a single fan base much in the way the hippies and Country-Western enthusiasts bonded in Austin a generation ago.