Photo by: Valerie Fremin

Jim Patton (guitar, main songwriter, vocals) began playing guitar after dropping out of college when his friend Kevin Ranes taught him the three chords to “Helpless” and invited him to join his band. He’s played in bands and written songs ever since.

Patton cites 20th century American fiction (“from Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner to Kerouac and Salinger and Raymond Chandler”) and the various lives of the friends he grew up with in Maryland (“I knew doctors and lawyers and waitresses and teachers and water rats and gravediggers and the guy who drove the truck that emptied the port-o-pots all over the state”) as the main source of his lyrical inspiration.

Musically, Patton admits he learned acoustic guitar playing Bob Dylan songs,and electric guitar playing the Rolling Stones, and "that was the last time I learned anybody else's songs but my own."

Photo by: Valerie Fremin

Sherry Brokus: (vocals, percussion) helped start the first folk masses at St. Johns Church in Severna Park, MD with her friend Johdie Cadorette when she was in junior high, but her musical talents lay dormant until she came upon Patton and his brother playing at the Oxbow Inn in Arnold, MD and asked if she could sit in. She sang “Cowgirl In The Sand” and has played in bands with Patton ever since.

In addition to her musical career, she is a practicing psychotherapist who in addition to her private practice in Austin pioneered the first Baltimore City HIV/AIDS street outreach program, and developed the adolescent parenting program used by People Against Child Abuse.