Cherryholmes 'Black & White' album

Grammy nominated family band Cherryholmes exploded on the bluegrass scene in 2005 with their self-titled debut album for Skaggs Family Records. They sang, played, and danced their way into the hearts of audiences all over the worold, earning them an International Bluegrass Music Association Award for Entertainer of the Year. With an electrifying new album, Cherryholmes II Black And White, Cherryholmes is ready to take the bluegrass world by storm all over again!

The hard-driving crowd pleaser, "I Don't Know", the Celtic tones of "My True Love", and the wise warning of "Greedy Hands" showcase the talent the Cherryholmes family have as contemporary songwriters, while their interpretations of classics such as Lester Flatt's "I'll Never Shed Another Tear" and the instrumental "Darkness on the Delta" reflect their deep respect for the roots of bluegrass music. New tunes by contributing songwriters also flow throughout the album - the most stirring of these is "Black and White" with the bluegrass-gospel darling Sonya Isaacs doing double-duty as songwriter and background vocalist along with bluegrass ambassador Ricky Skaggs. The hardest working family in any genre of music, Cherryholmes continuously polishes their craft, shining brighter with each new release.

biography
Back in 1999, the dynamic family band known as Cherryholmes didn’t exist, and half of its youthful members hadn’t even picked up instruments yet. In five short years, this high-energy Nashville-based act was named International Bluegrass Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year (2005).

The Cherryholmes family has several qualities that make them unique, but the basis of their success lies in plain, old-fashioned hard work combined with shining star talent that only appears to glow more brightly with each performance. They embody the American bluegrass dream.

Jere and Sandy Cherryholmes met in their church, married, and began raising a family of six children in Bell, California, just outside of Los Angeles. Jere was a carpenter for the L.A. County school system, and Sandy home-schooled the children. In 1999, their eldest daughter, Shelly, died at age 20 in her sleep from respiratory failure, due to chronic heart problems. The family heard about a nearby bluegrass festival and decided to go, to lift their spirits.

“We saw Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys and it changed our entire lives, going to that bluegrass festival and spending that day with them,” Sandy recalls. “On the way home, Jere said, ‘You know, what we really need right now is to do something special with our kids. Let’s start a bluegrass group.’ We decided who would play what and I started giving them music lessons.”

Cia (banjo), B.J. (fiddle), Skip (guitar), and Molly (fiddle) were assigned instruments. “Well, if you asked them, they would have all picked drums,” Sandy laughs. “Cia was playing guitar in church and singing, the little kids weren’t playing anything, and I was a piano player. So I decided that I would play whatever was left, and so would Jere. That left him with the bass and me with the mandolin.”

“When the younger ones were just starting, they couldn’t play much, so we orchestrated the music so that no one could tell,” Sandy explains. “I divided the parts up and they only played one note each – so it sounded like double stops. Then I played the mandolin with them, and they played on pitch. We taught Skip to play a few banjo licks on the mandolin, and then we just played really loud and fast,” she laughs. “Within four months we started getting invitations from people wanting us to come and play.”

By year’s end, the family took a gig on Saturdays in the San Bernardino Mountains. “We started the dancing out of a desperate need for songs,” Sandy confides. “We only had about 15 songs and we had to play for six hours! I had been teaching them Irish step-dancing in their P.E. classes anyway, so we put together some dance routines.”

What started out as a desire to draw the family closer together during their time of sorrow had developed into a legitimate part-time band. Cherryholmes won a few local contests and the promoters kept calling as their skills improved and their reputation spread.

After a 32-hour round trip to play a show in Colorado, Jere realized they had reached their weekend driving limit. “People advised us that if we were going to do this with our kids, we needed to do it while they were young,” he said. “So we talked about it and prayed about it, and decided that we were going to sell the house and I would quit my job and we would just go – and whatever happened, happened. I left my job in July of 2002.”

By 2003, Cherryholmes had made their first appearances on the Grand Ole Opry, Ernest Tubb’s Midnight Jamboree, the CMA Music Fest and IBMA’s Bluegrass FanFest. In mid-October 2004, the band kicked off their own festival, the Best in Tradition With Cherryholmes, at Hoofer’s Gospel Barn in LaGrange, Georgia. “A lot of the energy when we play comes from the hard work and the long hours on the road when you’re tired. But then you get onstage and for all six of us, it almost blows up – in a positive way. I think that has a lot to do with why we’re so driven and why we can do so much,” Sandy explains.

All six band members pull their creative ideas together, forming a sound and a style that is unmistakably Cherryholmes. Their live shows include twin fiddles, Irish step-dancing, classic country yodeling, and old-time claw hammer banjo, in addition to their dynamic bluegrass. Their vocals and instrumentation are aggressive without losing the precision of smooth, blended family harmony.

“The whole concept is that we have high-powered instrumentals that are at warp speed,” Jere says. “We’ve got bluegrass; we’ve got traditional stuff from the Stanleys and Monroe. We try to take the audience on a roller coaster ride, on purpose. We want them to experience highs and lows, and speed and excitement.”

The industry continues to acknowledge their success as well. In 2006, they received a Grammy nomination for their first commercial release on Skaggs Family Records, self-titled Cherryholmes. A follow-up album, Cherryholmes II: Black and White, will be available in June 2007.

Jere concludes, “I heard someone say that bluegrass music has to change or evolve, or it will die. I don’t think it needs to be changed. It just needs new breath. I feel like maybe I’m offering something like that with my family.”

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Tracklisting

Cherryholmes - Black & White