Lemuel Sheppard was born in Kansas City Kansas’s Douglas Hospital in 1956. The same hospital only 30 years earlier as part of the campus of the earliest and most prestigious black universities west of the Mississippi. During this time the music department became a mecca for the African-American intellectual community including Booker T. Washington, Will Marion Cook, Etta Moten Barnett, Nora Holt, and Eva Jessye. This was Sheppard’s seminal exposure to Kansas City’s music scene that was pervasive his entire childhood.
By the time Sheppard was 9 he was playing guitar regularly with the sons of veteran Kansas City blues organist, Lawrence Wright who at the time employed a young Albert Collins. Wright and Collins would often come by Sheppard’s house before a gig to borrow equipment from him and Wright’s sons.
Music and musicians were pervasive around the Sheppard family. His father was once a cabbie who lived on 12th and Vine, befriended Jay McShann and Claude “Fiddler” Williams before they came to Kansas City from Oklahoma. His mother, a classmate of Charlie Parker and Ben Kynard, sang to him refrains from Porgy and Bess and told him stories about the great singer William Warfield. One of the guitarists for Louis Jordan, “The King of the Jukebox”, performed at his mother’s funeral in 1977.
A year after his mother’s death Sheppard found himself struggling in college. He had previously never read or sang a note of music. His goal of earning a degree in music theory slowly began slipping away. However, in 1978 Dr. Eva Jessye, the choral director for the original Broadway musical Porgy & Bess, changed all this with her visit to Pittsburg State University. That same year Albert Collins and William Warfield came to the music department of Pittsburg State University, but it was Dr. Jessye that took Lemuel under her tutelage to eventually become a soloist in the Eva Jessye Choir and appear in a CBS special segment with her.
Since graduating 1983 with degrees in Saxophone and Music Theory he has become a traveling Bluesman. He has taken his unique brand of Kansas City Blues to South America, Africa, on nationwide tours, and a solo performance at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2000.
Sheppard has performed alongside Taj Mahal, Jimmie Lee Robinson, Little Charlie and The Night Cats, Sparky Rucker, Danny Cox, Mark Selby, Cephas and Wiggins, Drink Small, Alvin Youngblood Hart, and Honey Boy Edwards among many more.
Lem's original contemporary acoustic blues songs have become popular with audiences of all ages. His humor and wit along with history and storytelling make Lem's concert an enlightening and entertaining experience that audiences are sure to remember.
The US Embassy in Brazil touted Sheppard as “The perfect touring artist, talented, flexible, knowledgeable of his own culture and interested in others."
The Eisteddfod International Music Festival in South Africa said “[Sheppard] is an example in international and inter-cultural relations"
Sheppard was inducted into the Oklahoma Blues Hall of Fame in 2003.
In 2007 he was the recipient of the Joan O’Bryan award from the Kansas Folklore Society.
Sheppard was asked to compose and perform the soundtrack to the PBS documentary "Black, White & Brown"