Bluegrass and Country Music singer. He was the husband of country singer Lorrie Morgan. He was born in Ashland, Kentucky and grew up in Sandy Hook, Kentucky. Keith learned to play guitar at a very young age and appeared on the Buddy Starcher regional television show as a small child. He formed a Bluegrass band with his friend Ricky Skaggs a few years later. When both boys were teenagers they were asked to play spontaneously at a local show when Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys arrived late. Stanley came into the building while they were singing one of his songs and has always said that he thought it was a jukebox playing his actual recording. He soon hired them for his band and they stayed for two years until Keith went to work for Carl Jackson. By 1974, he had already survived a car crash (at 120 mph) and driving a car off a cliff into a river but by 1978 his excessive drinking made him unreliable. He had developed a honky-tonk vocal sound. In 1986, he married rising country music singer Lorrie Morgan and cracked the Top 20 for the first time with "Miami, My Amy." Keith finally reached No. 1 in 1988 with "Don't Close Your Eyes." He continued his streak with his well known song "I'm No Stranger to the Rain" but just as he had begun to have some success, he died. In 2022, Whitley was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (CMHOF).

His cenotaph is a larger than life sized statue of him which was commissioned by the Keith Whitley Foundation in his hometown of Sandy Hook, Kentucky, located on Kentucky Route 7 just north of the small town in which he grew up. It was sculpted by Bill Raines and dedicated on July 1, 1999, which would have been Whitley's 45th birthday. The statue is visible in the front center of the cemetery and stands about 10 feet tall. Bill Rains was a famous sculptor in the Billings, Montana area and had previously created sculptures of several other famous musicians in numerous locations.