TRENTON – Give the crowd what they want and they’ll keep coming back for more.
For nearly 20 years, that’s how Cherokee made itself a mainstay in Pictou County and a returning favourite across Nova Scotia and other parts of the Maritimes. Playing to the crowd, they were never short on country and old-time music.
“We were the closest thing to an Irish band that a country band could be,” said founding member Dennis MacDonald. “We carried on and interacted with the audience.”
Cherokee formed in the mid-1970s as a mix of working musicians of the day, with Dennis MacDonald, Jackie Druhan, Roy Kenny and Richard Chisholm, who’s since passed away, as its original members.
“We were all playing in different bands at the time this started,” MacDonald said. “Roy and Jackie were playing in a band called Country 5. They broke up so they came to play with us. Richard was with me in another band, and we called ourselves the Country Spurs – but Richard originally was playing with the Wylde Pack.”
“So it was sort of a makeup of guys in other bands and we put it together.”
They played two, sometimes three nights a week for stretches at a time, though each member kept a day job throughout.
“We had longevity,” MacDonald said. “I suppose we’d have been the longest running band around here. I remember bands would go for four or five years, give it up and play somewhere else.”
MacDonald and Kenny played with the band throughout, while John Urquhart joined when Chisholm retired. Others joined the band here and there, some in the bands later days. Sandy Lumsden joined Cherokee during a temporary absence by Druhan. Jake Carrigan and Vernon Burns also played with Cherokee.
The band takes its name from the small single propeller plane by the same name, Kenny explained.
“At that time, I was flying airplanes – it was either Dennis or Richard – and we were looking for a name for the band. They asked me, ‘What are the names of some of those airplanes you fly?’
“Well, usually it was a Cessna, but that day I was flying a Cherokee – and they said ‘that’s what we’re calling it.’ So it just came like that.”
They were a dance band, when public dances were the tickets to have on the weekend.
“We played pretty near all of the legions in the county, just about all the fire halls in the county, plus Goodman Auditorium,” Kenny said. The dances would start at 9 p.m., he remembers, “and if you weren’t in there by nine, you couldn’t get in.”
The legion in New Glasgow was a particularly busy haunt. “They’d be over what they could have in the building. We were always worried about the fire marshal coming and shutting us down.”
Cherokee had a vast set list to draw on and with three singers in the band, they were versatile performers.
“We could play maybe three or four dances without playing the same thing over again. We had quite a variety of stuff. Our music, basically, was country, the old 50s 60s rock and roll, and the old-time music. We had something for everybody,” MacDonald said. “Merle Haggard was our biggest thing, everybody was playing Merle Haggard, but he was who we were playing more than anybody.
“I’m not saying we were the best band around at that time, but we were popular enough to have the halls filled where we played.”
Crowds would follow the band from town to town and the guys in Cherokee were more than obliging with requests.
“Oh yeah,” MacDonald said. “There was always someone coming up with a piece of paper – say it was an anniversary, asking ‘Would you play this song, that song.’ And we always covered everything.”
“St. Anne’s Reel, everywhere we went,” Kenny said. “There was a couple that followed us around pretty much everywhere we went – definitely had to play St. Anne’s Reel.”
While Cherokee was a decidedly Pictou County band, they did travel to P.E.I. to play in Charlottetown, sometimes in Cape Breton and also in smaller communities.
“We’d go to the Island. We enjoyed playing there because we got to play Friday night and Saturday night over there, and the odd time Saturday afternoon. It was a getaway. We all stayed in the motel, didn’t make a heck of a lot of money by the time we got home.”
Kenny, who played bass, would also pick up the mandolin when the crowd wanted old-time music.
“That would happen, when Johnny (Urquhart) was with us. I play the old-time stuff. And, when I was playing the old-time music, then Johnny would play the bass for me. And then when we were done with the old-time stuff, I’d go back to playing the bass, Johnny’d go back and play the lead.
“I remember Roy signing autographs when he was playing old-time music in Pomquet,” Dennis laughs.
“Well, that’s all they wanted,” Kenny replied. “You put the old time music away and they’d come up and say ‘When are you going to play more?’”
Bottom line, MacDonald said, was that they played for the people.
“Whatever they wanted. If they told you that they wanted old-time music 10 times a night, we played it 10 times a night. In a place like that, that’s what they wanted too. What’s the point of them all standing around, looking at the wall, and not dancing?”
To be mentioned in the same breath as other nominees in The News’ Virtual Music Hall of Fame is humbling, MacDonald said.
“It was nice to see Charlie Long in there. He showed me the first chords I ever played on the guitar"
Both thanked voters who supported Cherokee in their nomination and Barry Trenholm of Trenton for putting the band forward.
“The people that supported us over the years, it was fabulous,” MacDonald said. “We had a good run.”
