The Holmes Brothers – Elementary Grace
Nowhere is this more apparent than on their version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, a number Street suggested they cut that’s galvanized by Wendell’s grungy, on-the-verge-of-distorting guitar. The track sounds more like something the Supersuckers would do than the Drifting Cowboys, and yet it’s still very southern — a marvel of unvarnished soul.
“It’s very raunchy,” Wendell says. “We made it into a blues. I wanted to do it the old Hank Williams way, but Craig said, ‘No, mix it up, make it a blues. Make it your own.’ And so with that, we kind of jazzed it, uh, loosened it up a little.”
“We’re big country fans, always have been,” Sherman says. “It’s part of our background because we listened to a lot of Hank Williams. And we definitely listened to the [Singing] Cowboys. I don’t know if you consider them country or not, but we were big Gene Autry fans. And I like mountain music. They call it bluegrass, but I love that stuff.” (Witness, again, the Dolly-inspired version of “Shine” on Simple Truths.)
“I think country has the best lyrics of all music,” says Wendell. “Of all music. The lyrics are so strong, whether it’s ‘This is my story and I’m sticking to it,’ or ‘Forever and ever, amen.’ And Hank Williams, we’ve done ‘I Saw The Light’. I just like his stuff so much.
“Back in the ’50s, [radio] stations didn’t have many watts,” he continues. “So you’d be listening to Jimmy Reed and all of a sudden here would come Hank Williams on a 100,000-watt station, compared to the 10,000 [you’d been listening to]. It would just override Jimmy, but it was a blessing in disguise, because it gave us the opportunity to be focusing on country and gospel and all different genres of music.”
The ecumenism, or catholicity, of which Wendell speaks — born of a childhood tuning in, among other stations, Nashville’s WSM, with its Opry-ready country, and the WLAC of Gene Nobles and Hoss Allen, with its midnight R&B — is one of the hallmarks of the Holmes Brothers aesthetic. It’s also a syncretistic approach to music that’s all but anathema in today’s niche-driven entertainment industry.
And it’s true not just of the trio’s recordings and live shows, but in the range of performers with whom they’ve worked and recorded, a roster that includes Peter Gabriel, Van Morrison, and the sublime East Coast rap troupe the Jungle Brothers. On Shout, Sister, Shout!, last year’s tribute album to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Holmes Brothers appear on tracks by Joan Osborne, Odetta, Phoebe Snow, and Victoria Williams. Currently, they can be heard on Gabriel’s “Burn Me Up”, a single that’s not only receiving widespread airplay but also has found its way into the TV commercial for a popular video game.
This easy mixing with people of disparate backgrounds also extends to the audiences the Holmes Brothers have attracted over the years, a following that transcends categories such as rural and urban, as well as blurring lines of gender, race, and social class. It also speaks to what is arguably the most transcendental aspect of the Holmes Brothers’ music: its spiritual dimension. Whether expressed explicitly in their versions of gospel standards from “I Surrender All” to “Can’t No Grave Hold My Body Down”, or in “secular” material that conveys the human striving for a connection to something greater, the trio’s music, while rooted in Christianity, ultimately speaks beyond faith traditions or doctrine.
“I think if you can bring people peace and happiness for a moment, you’ve done something,” says Sherman, who describes himself as spiritual, though “not so religious.”
“You’d be surprised how many people we touch from the spiritual side of it, because you know, living life, people are always looking for the truth, whatever that truth might be perceived to be,” Wendell says. “And that’s what we try to do, to lift everyone up, even when we go down into the depths.
“That’s why we call it spiritual music. I call myself a Christian, not forcing it down anyone else’s mouth or head or whatever, but because it’s part of my mission. I’m speaking for Wendell Holmes now [as opposed to the Holmes Brothers as a unit]. It’s part of my mission to spread the word of the gospel in the Bible as I see it everywhere I go. But I also love blues music. As I recall in the Bible, it was Jesus who turned water into wine, and not wine into water. So he must have been down for a good party.”
This balance, this commitment to meeting people where they’re at — and to creating something redemptive out of that call and response — is arguably what instills the Holmes Brothers’ music with the grace Toni Morrison wrote about in Beloved. That is, the trio no longer merely plays Nightclub the way Sherman and Wendell did when they were children. Instead, by imagining and embracing a more inclusive and better community — one in keeping, in many ways, with the beloved community of which Dr. King so often preached — they go about the crucial business of helping usher that community in.
As testimony, witness Joan Osborne’s liner notes to the trio’s 2001 album Speaking In Tongues, where she revisits the epiphany in which she first heard the Holmes Brothers at Dan Lynch’s bar after being summoned by “a raw, beautiful noise [that] spilled out behind them onto the sidewalk.”
“Coke dealers and pool sharks and Deadhead college kids and suits and Polish barmaids were all, every one, dancing with abandon,” she writes.
Our world needs more than that, especially now; nevertheless, Osborne’s is a study in grace as lived that will more than do for starters.
ND senior editor Bill Friskics-Warren would love to hear the Holmes Brothers reimagine a Conway Twitty hit or two, say either “How Much More Can She Stand” or “Fifteen Years Ago”.