Cheryl Renée shakes her moneymaker—and her audience
by Joe Tarr
Cheryl Renée can't keep her hands off herself.
Playing with a new band—Steve Brown on drums and Wendel Werner on keyboards—at the Platinum in the Old City, Renée isn't afraid to let the music move her, and sometimes that means wrapping her arms around her body and touching herself in places that proper ladies don't usually touch themselves in public, certainly not on a stage.
But Renée knows that any music worth a damn is about feeling, and when she feels sexy, she doesn't shy away from expressing it.
"Blues is all about sex and some people say I'm too much into that," she says, laughing. "But I appreciate the humor and the sultriness of it."
Her blunt and erotic demeanor infuses her music with a tension and energy that's not easily matched, and it woos audiences and makes reporters squirm slightly.
"I have a tendency to grab myself in places, so they know what I'm talking about. As long as I keep my girlish figure and don't disgust people, I'm going to continue to do that."
A new kid on the Knoxville music scene block, Renée is quickly proving herself, partly because of her wailing, evocative singing and partly because she busts her butt on the club circuit. She plays with a variety of bands, as well as solo. (Her main group, The Cheryl Renée Blues Band, includes Mark Pungercar on drums and Michael Jordan on guitar.)
Originally from Cincinnati, Renée started playing piano in grade school. She found she could make a living out of it. "My first band was all black; every other band after that was white," she says. "I liked the idea that the white musicians had nice instruments their mamas would buy them for them."
When she was 21, she hit the road touring (first stop Las Vegas) and didn't settle down for 11 years. "People asked me, 'Don't you hate living out of suitcases?' No. I was a kid, I had no responsibilities, my rent was paid for."
She had stints in Top 40 bands and the USO (United Service Organizations), which took her around the country and to Germany, Korea and Tokyo.
Eventually, Renée settled in New Hampshire, in a small town near Boston and a handful of other Northeastern cities where she played regularly with her husband in The Renée-Randall Blues Band.
The marriage eventually fell apart, and Renée set her sights on East Tennessee, where her father had bought a house at Tellico Village. "I felt like I needed a fresh start," she says.
She moved here in early 1999 and started looking for places to perform. "My dad said there's a regular jam at this club called Silly Sally's or something. It turned out to be Sassy Ann's. I went there every Wednesday until I could put a band together," she says.
Many of Knoxville's music stalwarts, including Sara Jordan, Hector Qirko and R.B. Morris, encouraged and helped her. Others were perhaps a bit intimidated by the newcomer. "I've been doing this for a long time. There were some people here who got pissed that I was moving too fast, to them. To me I was starving," she says. "They just talked about me like I was a dog."
Still having trouble making ends meet, Renée has moved through a number of day jobs, everything from stuffing sausage to welding (the latter of which she was particularly fond of for the cool mask and torch, but she could only work second or third shift—impossible hours for a club musician).
Renée is a persistent performer, playing with a number of different bands as well as solo. "I just like to get my eyes open to see what I can get into," she says.
She'll play both the Baker-Peters club out in sprawling West Knoxville and The Grand out east; a reception at the Beck Cultural Center and a Chamber of Commerce meeting at the Oak Ridge Mall; the Java coffeehouse in the Old City and larger nightclubs like Manhattan's and the Platinum.
For some reason, Renée finds herself drawn more to male songs than the female ones, and she performs compositions by Sonny Boy Williamson, Junior Wells, and Qirko.
A CD of hers is due out in September. It'll include five songs from her CD with the Renée-Randall Blues Band, and five recordings with her Knoxville band. The title, I Believe You Know the Blues, comes from a line in Qirko's song, "The Blues is a Living Thing," which she recorded.
"I'm a terrible songwriter, but I'm a good entertainer and I'm a song stylist," she says. "There's so many good songs out there and it doesn't make any sense to waste time writing my own."
Although she likens her vocal style to Dinah Washington's smooth, croony voice, her music is firmly rooted in the simplicity of the blues—simple in structure, but complex in breadth of emotion.
"Blues is a genre for the everyman. You'll hear something and think, 'Man, I can relate to that.' A lot of people think it's about crying in your beer, but it's really about recognizing something and being able to relate to it," Renée says.
"Jazz is cool, but I can't dance to jazz. When the jazz band goes off on a solo, you know why everyone claps when they finish? Because they're glad it's over. They can't tap their foot no more, they can't do anything. It's like, 'Come back.'
"Then there's the head-banging stuff, and if you bang your head you can't have sex—it's not safe sex."
August 9, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 32
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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