Cheryl White

She was born on 27 January 1955. Her father played piano and mandolin in honky-tonk bands in Texas, and in 1961 the family moved to Arkansas, where Buck and his wife Pat formed a band with another couple that became the Down Home Folks. Sharon and Cheryl first sang with the Down Home Kids, a group of the members’ children, in the mid-1960s, and then joined their parents at bluegrass festivals. Sharon played bass from the age of twelve and moved to guitar when Cheryl took over the bass.

A well-received set at Bill Monroe’s festival in Bean Blossom, Indiana, in 1971 persuaded the family to move to Nashville. Their first album, Buck White & the Down Home Folks (County, 1972), had Cheryl on bass and vocals, Sharon on guitar and Buck on mandolin, with their mother singing, Kenny Baker on fiddle and Jack Hicks on banjo. Pat White retired from the band in 1973. Cheryl played bass on That Down Home Feeling (Ridge Runner, 1977), with Ricky Skaggs on fiddle, Jerry Douglas on Dobro and Roland White on guitar, and on the live In Person (County, 1977), recorded at Randy Wood’s Old Time Picking Parlor with Mark O’Connor and Norman Blake. On Poor Folks’ Pleasure (Sugar Hill, 1978) she sang lead on two songs, shared a third with Sharon, and sang harmony on most of the rest.

By the late 1970s the sisters were also singing harmony on other artists’ records. On Emmylou Harris’s Light of the Stable (Warner Bros., 1979), credited as Cheryl Warren and Sharon Hicks, they sang behind Harris on “Christmas Time’s A-Coming,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “The First Noel,” “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem” and “Silent Night,” and the Whites sang harmony on the title song and Paul Simon’s “The Boxer” on her Roses in the Snow (1980), recorded in July 1979. Cheryl played bass on part of Jerry Douglas’s Fluxedo (Rounder, 1982), including “Ben Dewberry’s Final Run.” On Ricky Skaggs’s Family & Friends (Rounder, 1982), recorded at the Castle in Franklin, Tennessee, she sang the unaccompanied “Talk About Sufferin’” with Sharon and Skaggs, and with Buck and Sharon on “Hallelujah I’m Ready,” “Won’t It Be Wonderful There” and “River of Jordan.”

Sharon married Skaggs in 1981, and he produced the Whites’ first country hits for Curb and Warner Bros. On Old Familiar Feeling (1983) Cheryl sang lead on “Follow the Leader” and “I’ll Be Lovin’ You” and harmony on most of the other tracks, with session bassists Joe Osborn and Emory Gordy Jr. on the bass. “You Put the Blue in Me” (1982) was the Whites’ first Top Ten country hit, and “Hangin’ Around,” “I Wonder Who’s Holding My Baby Tonight,” “Give Me Back That Old Familiar Feeling” and “Pins and Needles” all reached the Top Ten between 1982 and 1984. The group was nominated for Grammys for “You Put the Blue in Me,” and for the instrumental “Move It On Over,” and joined the Grand Ole Opry on 2 March 1984; a third nomination came in 1989 for the gospel album Doing It by the Book.

Her session work continued alongside the band. She sang harmony with Sharon on “Cora Is Gone” and, with Buck, on “Twelve Gates to the City” on Tim O’Brien’s Hard Year Blues (Flying Fish, 1984), and in January 1986 she was one of the harmony singers, with Glen Duncan, Kathy Chiavola and Pat Enright, throughout Hazel Dickens’s It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song (Rounder), including “A Few Old Memories” and “You’ll Get No More of Me.”

The Whites sang “Keep on the Sunny Side” on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (2000), which won the Grammy for Album of the Year and the IBMA’s Album of the Year, and took part in the Down from the Mountain concert recording that the IBMA honored the following year. Sharon and Cheryl also shared the IBMA’s Recorded Event award for 2001 for Follow Me Back to the Fold: A Tribute to Women in Bluegrass, and in 2006 the IBMA gave the Whites a Distinguished Achievement Award. With Skaggs they made Salt of the Earth (Skaggs Family, 2007), recorded at Skaggs Place in Hendersonville, Tennessee, on which Cheryl sang lead on Don Gibson’s “Big Wheel” and shared “Farther Along” with Skaggs; it won the Grammy for Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album in 2008, the year the Whites entered the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame. She sang “Old Train” on the various-artists album Bluegrass Girl (Green Hill, 2007), and on A Skaggs Family Christmas (2005) she sang lead on “Mary, Did You Know?” and harmony elsewhere; a second volume followed in 2011. In March 2024 the Whites marked forty years as Opry members. Buck White died on 13 January 2025, aged 94.

• 1984: Member of the Grand Ole Opry (the Whites)
• 2001: IBMA Album of the Year, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (among the featured artists)
• 2001: IBMA Recorded Event of the Year, Follow Me Back to the Fold: A Tribute to Women in Bluegrass (with Sharon White and others)
• 2002: Grammy, Album of the Year, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (among the featured artists); IBMA Album of the Year, Down from the Mountain (among the featured artists)
• 2006: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award (the Whites)
• 2008: Grammy, Best Southern, Country or Bluegrass Gospel Album, Salt of the Earth (Ricky Skaggs and the Whites); Texas Country Music Hall of Fame (the Whites)