With The Richmond Sessions, the surviving Holmes brother goes it alone.
Photos by Pat Jarrett, courtesy of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities
When Sherman Holmes was a teenager, growing up in the middle peninsula map blip of Christchurch, he and his younger brother Wendell would often play music on Saturday night in their cousin’s local juke joint and then get up in the morning to perform at the church. “It was good training for us,” Holmes, 77, says today. “Both of us took piano lessons. He played trumpet and sousaphone, and I played clarinet and saxophone. We always loved the music, you know.”
And with that last bit of understatement, Sherman Holmes laughs. Hard. It’s a guttural belly laugh so infectious that one can’t help but join in.
The Holmes brothers never lost that penchant for joyously mixing raw blues and spiritual music. For 70 years, Sherman and Wendell forged and honed a musical bond that only became more special when drummer and singer Popsy Dixon became an adopted sibling and helped them form the Holmes Brothers band in 1979.
No one sounded quite like the Holmes Brothers, as steeped in the ways of traditional and modern country as they were in R&B and gospel. You could hear all of it, often within the same song, in their performances. Over three decades as a working unit, the trio gave the world hundreds of electrifying live shows (including a gig for President Bill Clinton in the White House), and released a dozen acclaimed albums, often collaborating with the likes of Van Morrison, Willie Nelson and Peter Gabriel. For their achievements, the National Endowment For the Arts awarded the trio the National Heritage Fellowship in 2014, the highest honor in the field of folk and the traditional arts.
And then, one year later, it was over.
“I’m alone. My brothers are dead, you know,” Sherman says, the laughter halting in his Saluda home, not far from where he grew up. “That was a rough time for me and it still is.”
Popsy Dixon, who owned one of the great falsettos, passed away first, from bladder cancer. “Me and Wendell were really his family,” he tells me. “He’s buried in our family cemetery.” Holmes still marvels at what he describes as the drummer’s tremendous talent: “When I first heard him sing, I couldn’t believe it,” he says. As someone who has had to navigate vocals while playing the bass, Sherman also admired Popsy’s ability to sing a song with delicate grace while holding down the beat. “He was also the best bass player I ever heard. He could get down low, I mean, low. He was tall and built like a pipe, so you can imagine…”
Wendell—born Warner—had been battling cancer for years and eventually succumbed to complications from pulmonary hypertension. The showman of the group, and inarguably one of the most underrated guitarists in roots music, Wendell collapsed just after Popsy’s death and never recovered.
“They died within six months of each other, it was shocking to me,” says Sherman. “It knocked me right off my feet. I tried to do some other stuff and it just didn’t work out.”
“I knew he was in a place in his life and career where he was wondering, ‘what do I do now?’” Jon Lohman says. As Virginia’s State Folklorist at the non-profit Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Lohman had worked with the Holmes Brothers numerous times; they were serving as blues mentors in the VFH’s apprenticeship program when illness struck. “Sherman finished out the program alone. He was apprenticing singer Whitney Nelson, and at the performing showcase, not long after his brother’s death, he sang an extra song, ‘I Want Jesus,’ as a tribute to Wendell,” Lohman recalls. “I was blown away by his voice.”
That’s how the Sherman Holmes Project started, Lohman recalls. “I asked him if he was up to do an album. The first thing he asked was, ‘Jon, can you get me one of those country bands you work with?’”
Recorded in two days at Montrose Studios in Richmond, Sherman’s first solo album, The Richmond Sessions is, like the best of the Holmes Brothers output, a beautiful fusion of down home styles.
For the album, released on MC Records in July, Lohman didn’t just assemble a country band for Sherman, but a stellar, diverse, all-Virginian lineup: bluegrass banjo specialist Sammy Shelor, dobro master Rob Ickes, keyboardist Devon Harris (known for working with funk and hip-hop bands) and, adding serious gospel soul, Richmond powerhouses the Ingramettes on backing vocals. Even producer Lohman gets a taste, contributing harmonica to three tracks. There are special guests, including singer, and longtime friend, Joan Osborne, who duets with Sherman on the R&B classic, “Dark End of the Street.” The Holmes Brothers were known for transforming other peoples’ songs—from Jim Reeves to Cheap Trick—and Sherman’s deconstructing of Ben Harper (“Homeless Child”), Marvin Gaye (“Don’t Do It”) and Vince Gill (“Liza Jane “) is masterful and inclusive. There are no genres here. “I refer to it as Americana,” Holmes says of the sound. “It’s American music, you know.”
Right now, the newly minted solo artist is planning a series of shows to promote the new record, including a stint on National Public Radio’s “Mountain Stage” and an October appearance at the Richmond Folk Festival. “I just hope I can do a good job,” he says. “I have to practice standing up for 90 minutes playing bass, I’ve been going to the gym to try and build up my stamina.”
Holmes acknowledges that it’s a formidable task to take the spotlight alone, to essentially reinvent himself at his age. “The way the music world is going now, it’s hard to know what direction to go into. It’s almost like free fall,” he says, adding, “Maybe I don’t know any better, they say ignorance is bliss.”
And Saluda again rings with laughter. It’s a welcome sound after all of the tears.
For more on The Richmond Sessions by the Sherman Holmes Project, go to MC-Records.com
