It’s a long way from Elk Lick to Hollywood. Sherry Hackney Cade was born in a small, rural farming community in southwest Ohio. Her father quit fourth grade to work in the coal mines of Kentucky and her mother was a third-generation Appalachian Cherokee Indian who quit eighth grade to marry Sherry’s father at the age of fourteen. These roots would provide Sherry with her earliest musical influences of bluegrass, gospel, and country music. When Sherry was three and started picking out tunes on her grandmother’s organ (acquired by a trade of Kentucky moonshine), her mother had the foresight to start Sherry on music lessons. She started writing music by the age of four, carefully drawing lines to form her own music paper.
“I didn’t even know manuscript paper existed! I could read and write music before I could read and write words…I don’t remember a time before I was playing and writing music,” Sherry comments from her castle-like estate, Sunny Gables, just outside Los Angeles. “It’s pretty amazing that my parents were so devoted given they weren’t particularly musical and had virtually no formal education. I still have a rejection letter from a well-known publisher in reponse to my mother’s inquiry and submission of a piece I wrote when I was ten, suggesting it could be a movie main title theme. They pointed out kindly that music was usually written for a movie—and not the other way around, but that I should definitely keep studying composition. My mother was so bold because she didn’t know any better and I got a lot of performance exposure I wouldn’t have otherwise because of her. I got to play everywhere from the Dayton Philharmonic to the Preble County Pork Festival!”
Sherry started playing professionally in church at the age of seven, becoming the full-time music director moving on to conducting choirs, musicals, theatre and eventually taking on students at the age of 13. She toured summers and competed on piano and flute nationally garnering superior ratings, awards, trophies, scholarships and secured a place in the 1980 edition of “Who’s Who in Music.”
“Performing was great—especially for my personal development; it really brought me out of my shell,” admitting she was shy and awkward growing up. She laughs and notes that there are probably a few people who wish she’d put that shell back on. She then waves her hand and states, “Life’s too short not to live it boldly. But my first love has always been writing music. I had the chance to perform several of my works in and around Dayton growing up and the highlight was debuting a suite for jazz flute and piano in my senior year at age 16.”
After skipping her junior year in high school and graduating in 1980, Sherry dashed off to New York City with a hundred bucks in her pocket, a promised part-time gig, a flute class scheduled at Juilliard and a $35 plane ticket back home.
“I sold the plane ticket…went to see the original cast on Broadway of Evita the night of my original graduation date,” she reminisces. “It was a complete culture shock coming from my small little town with a tiny house on a gravel road to a city of millions-but the music! So many different kinds of people and music…Jamaican, Middle Eastern, Indian, East African, West African! The global lessons I learned there in both music and life have left a deep and unforgettable imprint that still influences my thoughts and work today.”
Throughout the 80s & 90s, with stints in New York, Cape Cod, and San Francisco, finally settling in LA to finish school at UCLA, Sherry toured with various bands both nationally and abroad, recording albums with such underground counter-culture favorites as The Fabulous Dyketones, Sadie and the Masochists, Lucky Danger and the Charms, and Girlgroup. You could have caught her playing keys and electric flute with purple hair in an all-female original band, playing solo jazz piano on cruise ships, playing the blues behind chicken wire in a honky-tonk to a 50s retro cover-band complete in poodle skirt with choreography.
“Travel is life’s greatest teacher. No matter where you go or who you meet, we really are a lot more alike than different…and the differences we DO have seriously need to be respected,” Sherry says of her travels both for work and pleasure. “You just can’t know ‘til you go…”
While her travels have taken her throughout most of Europe several times, Iceland, most of North and Central America, her most recent travelling was for the documentary “My Uncle Hector,” which includes over 130 interviews from nearly every state in the Union in which Sherry conducted on-camera interviews asking folks on the street to identify characters that are real or fictional, revealing a surprising fact at the end and filming the reaction.
“This is my second project with director Darlena Roberts and the travelling was the best part. We saw the ravaged areas from Katrina, met soldiers fresh back from Iraq wanting to share their stories and show us their scars, and captured things we never would have if hadn’t just gotten in my Suburban and drove cross-country.” Sherry is executive producer, writer and composer in this film.
“This is my fifth film to which I bring skills other than just composing. I like being able to serve the project exactly as the client sees that vision being fulfilled.”
When not composing, conducting, recording or leading seminars in Southern California, Sherry enjoys spending time with her husband and young children at their 300 acre farm in Kentucky--just back down the holler of Elk Lick.
