The Sherier Mountain Boys
Preserving the Ward 3 Folk Blues Tradition

The Sherier Mountain Boys are a moveable feast of pickers, grinners, sinners, saints, scalawags and pilgrims on a wayward path to musical enlightenment. They coalesce Sunday mornings at the Palisades Farmers Market to unspool music that, while sometimes fingerpicked, is hard to put a finger on.

Last Sunday’s debut performance, for instance, included a breezy take on Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane,” a businesslike “Born in Chicago,” a dab of dub, a rash of reggae, a soupcon of John Cash shuffling with Mister Presley, a bouquet of “Dead Flowers,” and ol’ Neil singin’ not about the guvnah but hard times down by the river. And that was with only two Boys – Josh Wein on six steel strings and Michael Dolan on stand-up bass.
Imagine what’ll occur when the rest of the bunch shows up, like Morgan Prust on lead guitar, Niall Sullivan on alto sax, Frank Nagle on tenor, Steve Seem on harmonica, Rich “Handyman” Goldburg on bongos, and Jonathan Quigley, aka Crucial Q, on vocals and washboard. Rumor holds that OLV grad Steve Brown may unleash his sousaphone, lending the Boys some second-line oompah, with Paul Spillenger, lower Manhattan’s gift to the guitar and banjo, also threatening a strum-by.

Some term the Boys the conventional weapons division of WMD, a funkin’, poppin’, rockin’ soul outfit that began as a trio and mutated into a twelvesome, drawing a rowdy house at DC9 and livelying up the ‘hood with Sunday afternoon sessions that drew more than one curious and ultimately appreciative onlooker. “WMD” refers not to elusive armaments but to founding members Wein, drummer Ian Martinez (now entering exile deep in southwestern Indiana as a stalwart of the Obama campaign), and Dolan.
Contrarians suggest that the Sherier Mountain Boys enjoy at least a theoretical tongue-in-cheekish onomastic connection to the Rosslyn Mountain Boys, who, when Hector was a pup and before they turned into Payday, variously played in Claude Jones, the Hangmen, the Reekers, and other Washington rock aggregations that date so far back you’d have to drill deep into the archives or buttonhole Richard Harrington to find them.

“None of us claims to be any of those guys,” said Dolan, by far the oldest Boy. “But there does seem to be a spiritual link between the idea of mountains in Rosslyn and mountains on Sherier Place. And who can argue against preserving the Ward 3 folk blues tradition? We’re rising to an irresistible occasion. Come down. Buy some produce, throw the change in the hat, and listen in. You won’t regret it.”