The Holmes Brothers On World Cafe

Since they first came together more than 40 years ago, The Holmes Brothers' members have released 10 albums, won multiple Blues Music Awards and worked with artists ranging from Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to Odetta and Peter Gabriel. The band continues to fuse blues, gospel and soul on its newest album, Feed My Soul.

After starting out in rural Virginia, brothers Sherman and Wendell Holmes moved to New York, where their gospel style stood out in the city's top clubs. In 1979, they teamed up with drummer Popsy Dixon and christened themselves The Holmes Brothers; by 1992, they'd become the first American group to record for Peter Gabriel's Real World label. In recent years, The Holmes Brothers survived Wendell Holmes' successful 2008 battle with cancer, and emerged with the appropriately celebratory, harmony-drenched Feed My Soul.
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The Holmes Brothers: Ode To A 'Fair Weather Friend'

by Marc Silver
With a firm touch on the piano, Wendell Holmes plays the sort of rolling chords and stuttering notes that take a listener to church. But as he sings plaintively in his sharp tenor, he does not praise the Lord. "Fair Weather Friend," featured on the rootsy new Holmes Brothers album Feed My Soul, revolves around this sequence of events: "The doctor he said cancer, I stopped in my tracks / I did not have the answer, but I knew you'd have my back." Only the supposed friend deserted Holmes in his time of need.

Diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2008, Holmes underwent chemotherapy and radiation and now says he's in good health. Yet he appears to maintain lingering resentments over the pal who left him "in this mess." Recorded live in the studio, with just the singer, his piano and a honey-voiced backup chorus, "Fair Weather Friend" leaves only one unanswered question: Who's he singing about? As literal as the song seems at times, it may be that the song's gospel frame is providing a bit of ironic subtext: Could Holmes — who asks, "Did you care if I die?" — be disappointed in God for letting cancer strike him? "Fair Weather Friend" offers no answer to the identity of its titular betrayer; only the testimony of a wounded soul who finds comfort by pouring his deep hurt into a song of survival.
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