Walking Medicine is the musical project of Jenny Kimmel, an Appalachian songwriter and recording artist based in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, with deep roots in the North Carolina Piedmont. Her work is shaped by a lifelong relationship with land, home, and the quiet interior spaces where songs take root. Having spent most of her life on the same land, her writing reflects an attention to place and to the beauty that bends itself daily to our doors.
Music has accompanied her from an early age. In childhood, Johnny Horton and Pete Seeger records spun in the family cabin, and when her older sister’s interest in the banjo freed up the family guitar, Kimmel picked it up and began the decades-long practice of translating feeling into song. She now collaborates frequently with her sister, Ivy Sheppard, their shared musical language evident in Peace in the Middle, co-produced with Jeff Fuller in Nashville, Tennessee.
Writing and recording under the name Walking Medicine, Kimmel creates songs that hold tenderness and grit in equal measure, tracing themes of belonging, sovereignty, love, and the long work of becoming. Rooted in lived experience, her work remains grounded in presence and shaped by a life lived close to the land.
For Kimmel, performance is an extension of the songwriting itself—a place where what is born in solitude enters into exchange. She is currently writing and recording new work, hosting and curating Love & Land, an artist series in Asheville, and performing in Western North Carolina and beyond.