The Holmes Brothers

The Holmes Brothers’ long career began with a chance meeting in a New York nightclub about 1967. Sherman and Wendell Holmes were playing a gig when they met a fellow Virginia native, Willie “Popsy” Dixon, and invited him to sit in. Dixon’s deft drumming and multi-octave harmony vocals fit like a glove. As Wendell Dixon recalled years later, “After that second song, Popsy was a brother.” Over the next several years, the three continued to cross paths as they played in various groups before forming The Holmes Brothers in 1979 with Dixon on drums, Sherman Holmes on bass and Wendell Holmes on guitar and piano. Their musicianship and haunting harmonies made them adept at everything from juke-joint blues to gospel and country.

In the early years, they made their home base a Greenwich Village bar called Dan Lynch’s, where they often ran the Sunday afternoon jam session. There, they met Andy Breslau, a musician and record producer, who helped sign them to Rounder Records. Their popularity grew, and over the next several decades, The Holmes Brothers performed widely at home and abroad, appeared on radio and television and recorded a series of highly regarded albums. They wrote and performed the soundtrack for the film Lotto Land, in which the band appeared and Wendell Holmes played a troubled musician.

The brothers grew up in Christchurch, Virginia, listening both to the blues and to the gospel music and hymns in their Baptist church. They took to playing and singing at an early age and soon were performing in area churches and on some Saturday nights in a cousin’s juke joint. “That’s how we honed our sound,” Wendell Holmes has said. “We used to say we’d rock ’em on Saturday and save ’em on Sunday.” Sherman dropped out of Virginia State University in 1959 and moved to New York City for a job with Jimmy Jones, a singer who’d had a hit with “Handy Man.” A few years later, Wendell graduated from high school and joined his brother in New York.

Dixon was born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, but grew up in Brooklyn. He started playing drums at age 7 when his parents bought him a toy set. “By the next morning, the thing was in the trash can. I beat it all to death,” he told an interviewer. “But I tell you what … I knew how to play after that, I just knew. I had the rhythm down pat and had timing, too. Just that fast. I been playing ever since.”

Among their numerous honors, The Holmes Brothers was named Band of the Year by the Memphis-based Blues Foundation, which also picked State of Grace as Soul Blues Album of the Year in 2008. Sadly, the group's career ended in 2015 with the deaths of Dixon and Wendell Holmes. Sherman Holmes has continued to perform with the Sherman Holmes Project, featuring Brooks Long and Eric Kennedy. Despite the emotional devastation of losing his band mates, Holmes vowed to keep playing music as long as possible: "I have to, or otherwise that would be an end to me."