Jim Patton And Sherry Brokus

Patton met Brokus at a bar in Arnold, MD, when she approached him on a break and asked if she could sing a song with his band. Despite strict rules against strangers sitting in, Patton agreed she could sing Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand” with them. She and Patton have sung together ever since. They listened to a lot of Richard & Linda Thompson, the Byrds, the Airplane, the Everly Brothers, and Emmy Lou Harris singing with Bob Dylan when they started, but from the beginning they developed their own style.
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 (“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 says he learned to play acoustic guitar playing Bob Dylan and Neil Young songs, and electric in a band playing Rolling Stones songs, and “that was pretty much it for covers”