It’s indicative of the state of contemporary music that The Holmes Brothers receive praise for their take on American music such as “brazenly borderless”. As if no one had ever thought of performing gospel, country, bluegrass and blues!

Of course, brothers Wendell and Sherman and drummer Popsy Dixon hark back to a time when you could count the genres of American music on one hand and the distinction between them was far less significant. Indeed, on their latest album State Of Grace, The Holmes Brothers honour Hank Williams, a man in whose music gospel, country and western and blues were equal partners. Perhaps it’s an overlooked or half-forgotten era; certainly recent albums blending country and soul, like Solomon Burke’s Nashville and The Hacienda Brothers’ What’s Wrong With Right?, have been welcomed as visionary. State Of Grace goes hand in hand with those two records.

Raised in the ‘40s and ‘50s in Christchurch, Virginia, Wendell and Sherman Holmes grew up with church music, but were also surrounded by blues, bluegrass and country music. “As a matter of fact, when I was a kid one of my neighbours was a white guy that played bluegrass and he was really good!” recalls Wendell. “So I mean we listened to Hank Williams, we listened to Jimmy Reed, we listened to BB King…”

So, sure, The Holmes Brothers deserve all the praise they can get for their music, they play American roots music better than just about anyone alive today. But to call them brave or innovative for embracing musical styles that are so interrelated and that form the foundations of Western popular music is kind of ridiculous. But that’s where we’re at: in an age where music as an aggressively marketed product, new generations only know music as easily compartmentalised and labelled. And to them, something as ingenuous and soulful as The Holmes Brothers is probably a welcome surprise.                                                                    

For their first decade together, The Holmes Brothers were so into doing their own thing, they never even thought to chase down a recording contract. Indeed, they’d been performing music for twenty-five years, ten of those in The Holmes Brothers band, before they released their first record.

Wendell followed his older brother to New York around 1960 and the pair formed The Sevilles in 1963, backing John Lee Hooker and The Impressions, amongst others. It wasn’t until 1979 that Wendell and Sherman began playing with Popsy Dixon, also from Virginia, as The Holmes Brothers. In Dixon they found a third vocalist, as well as a talented drummer, allowing the trio to produce room (and heart) filling three-part harmonies to augment their bass/drums/guitar arrangements. This layered vocal approach was very much based on the brothers’ experiences with gospel music and it continues to inform every song they tackle.

Thriving as a live band, The Holmes Brothers found a home at New York venue Dan Lynch’s where they met a bunch of musicians including Joan Osborne and producer Andy Breslau. It was these associations that led Rounder Records to the band in the late ‘80s.

“Well they had us in the artist protection program!” Wendell chuckles when asked the no doubt familiar question why it took the band so long to release a debut. “No actually, we never did chase a record deal actually. They kind of found us and liked us and we went with Rounder, but we were very happy doing what we did, playing in the tri-State area, meaning New York and Connecticut and New Jersey. And by the time we started making records we were very well established on the local scene, so we could make a living, you know. So this is just icing on the cake.”

Joan Osborne has proven to be one of the band’s greatest allies, taking them on tour with her and recruiting them as her backing band. Osborne also teamed up with Trina Shoemaker to produce The Holmes Brothers’ 2001 debut for Alligator Records, Speaking In Tongues.                                                                                

Yep, after four albums for Rounder and one on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, The Holmes Brothers wound up at one of the world’s most prestigious blues labels, Bruce Iglauer’s Alligator Records.

“Alligator has been very, very good for us,” Wendell enthuses. “Bruce Iglauer who’s the owner of Alligator, he gives us room and space to do what we like to do and do what we want to do, and that means everything for an artist.”

In fact, a label as sensitive and independent as Alligator is really crucial for a band like The Holmes Brothers – a band that doesn’t easily fit into a single genre or appeal to a single target market.

“Well you know most record companies and most artists, for whatever reason, they want to be in a box – they want to be a blues artist or a gospel artist,” says Wendell.

“What I think it should be is based on your life’s experiences and what you grew up listening to and what has affected you musically. So for us it’s not just the blues, or gospel, it’s country and western, it’s bluegrass, it’s a lot of different kinds of music. So we don’t want to be put in a box, no.”

So, some forty-five years and ten albums (and a 2005 Blues Music Award from the Blues Foundation for Band Of The Year) into a remarkable career, The Holmes Brothers are meeting the kind of milestones reserved for long retired hall-offamers. And yet, here they are with a cracking new record and a frantic tour schedule that has recently seen them in Europe and will bring them to Australia this month as part of the Great Southern Blues and Rockabilly Festival line-up.

The newest album, State Of Grace, sees The Holmes Brothers once again demonstrating their talents both as songwriters and peerless interpreters. Alongside the handful of Wendell brothers’ compositions lie authoritative and original reworkings of songs like Nick Lowe’s ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding?’, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 'Bad Moon Rising’, George Jones’ ‘Ain’t It Funny What A Fool Will Do’ and Hank Williams’ ‘I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You’. Oh, and Cheap Trick’s ‘I Want You To Want Me’!

“Yeah, yeah people like that song a lot,” Wendell rumbles with amusement. “You know it’s so different from the Cheap Trick version. We slowed it down and just kind of made it our own you know.” He’s not kidding! Backed by piano, organ and bass, The Holmes Brothers take the feisty rock number and sigh gospel might into it. If you’d never heard the original before, hearing the two versions side by side you could easily believe the song to be originally composed as a gospel song and Cheap Trick’s version a later pop cover.

“Well actually our producer, who’s name is Craig Street, who did a lot of stuff with Norah Jones and Cassandra Wilson, he brought that song to the table,” Wendell reveals how such an unlikely song became a candidate for interpretation. “And I did not really know that song but when I listened to it, I didn’t really like it. But he said ‘you guys slow it down and just take your time, listen to it, and see if you can’t get to like it’. So we did it. And now it’s one of the audiences’ favourites.” And, as mentioned the Hank Williams song ‘I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You’ provides a perfect window into The Holmes’ Brothers influences; a window in which gospel, blues and country are all in plain view.                         

“Exactly, exactly, exactly right,” Wendell agrees. “As a matter of fact he wrote that song ‘I Saw The Light’ which is one of my favourite gospel songs. And ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ that’s one of my favourite secular songs, so he covered the gambit.”

Read the full feature in September Rhythms.