Cherryholmes
Neither Jere Cherryholmes nor his wife Sandy grew up playing music, but now they have a family band.
“I was in a rock’n’roll band in the 1960s and Sandy was a singer and did a lot of plays,” he said.
Furthermore, in Southeast Los Angeles, where the Cherryholmeses began their family/band, there was no bluegrass music in the air.
“It was 100 percent Hispanic area,” Jere Cherryholmes said. “So it was all mariachi music.”
But in 1999, the death of their oldest daughter Shelly set the family on an unusual journey that is putting them in the national spotlight for their music.
“Back in the '80s, I got involved in the Scottish Highlander games and at the festivals where I’d compete, they’d always have Celtic music,” Cherryholmes said. “We really liked that music and started listening to an NPR station that also played bluegrass music on Saturday mornings.”
Celtic music and culture had by then become so much a part of the family life that when Shelly died, they buried her in a tartan sash.
Her death, however, weighed heavily on the family, which included four surviving siblings ages 6 to 15, and they couldn’t seem to escape it. Even at church, they would be inundated with well-meaning friends asking how they were getting along and generally reminding them of their loss.
“We were looking to get away from the grieving, to go where nobody knows who we are,” Cherryholmes said. “On the NPR station we heard of a bluegrass festival about 70 miles from where we lived, so one Sunday we went there instead of church.”
One of the performing acts that day was Jim and Jesse McReynolds, and something about the family band idea struck Jere’s imagination.
“I told Sandy, 'What we need to do is get instruments and start playing that stuff around the house,’ ” he said.
So he scrounged up some instruments, including a guitar that he found in the trash and repaired a broken neck. Sandy knew a little about playing the fiddle, so she’d learn parts for fiddle and mandolin, then teach them to their children. Jere would learn guitar and bass parts and pass those along, too.
“We started messing around with this in the living room,” he said. “No one in the family ever had any lessons.”
After two months, they had nine songs in their repertoire and went to another festival where they did some tailgate busking.
“People started asking us to come and play places,” he said. “Then every time we played somewhere, we got two more people asking us to come and play.”
Eventually, realizing that if they stayed in L.A. and went out on the weekends, they could only do about a dozen bluegrass festivals a year, the family agreed that Jere should take an early retirement from his job as a carpenter with the Los Angeles Unified School District so they could move East, where the real playing took place.
Hitting their stride in 2003, they have traveled thousands of miles in their vintage 1960 GM 4104 bus/home. They have appeared on “The Grand Ole Opry,” The Ryman Auditorium, Ernest Tubb’s Midnight Jamboree, Nashville’s Country Music Fan Fare, Branson, Dollywood, IBMA Fan Fest and countless radio and TV shows, festivals and concert venues throughout the U.S.
Now, with a Grammy nomination for its second album, Cherryholmes is not only a fixture at bluegrass and roots music festivals (it recently played at Tall Stacks in Cincinnati), it’s also started playing theaters and arts centers.
