The Cherry Sisters The Best, Or The Worst Iowa Act--Ever

A colorized image of The Cherry Sisters

The Cherry Sisters didn’t arrive on the American stage—so much as detonate on it, like some godforsaken cyclone stuffed with tin pans, bad hymns, and the righteous confidence you normally only see in evangelists or heavily medicated congressmen. Five of them—Effie, Addie, Ella, Lizzie, Jessie—marching into the 1890s like a militia of homemade virtue, certain the world was ready for their greatness.

The world, of course, had other ideas.

 

Their traveling revue, a fever dream called “Something Good, Something Sad,” wasn’t a show so much as a moral crusade welded to accidental slapstick. They sang with the reckless abandon of people who did not know what singing required. They recited poetry like hostile witnesses in their own trial. They dispensed moral lectures with the zeal of frontier prosecutors. And they performed dramatic sketches stitched together like ransom notes.

 

The crowd responses were biblical.

 

One critic in Cedar Rapids said the sisters “sang the way a cow would sing if it had a soul.” Another praised their “unyielding devotion to art, even if they had no relationship to tune.” These were not your normal notices—these were dispatches from the front line of cultural catastrophe.

 

And the Cherry Sisters? They were dead serious.

 

Their brothers had vanished into the American West—murder, misadventure, or just the usual frontier disappearance—and the family needed money. Effie, who had the steel-eyed conviction of a prairie general, decided the stage was the answer. “We are the best show ever,” she said, without blinking. “We give the people what is good for them.”

 

The people came, all right—not for salvation but to witness the public spectacle usually reserved for political scandals and train wrecks. In Dubuque, some poor bastard hurled a turnip at them. Addie calmly dusted it off and returned it with the line, “We feed our family with better than this.”

 

The audience roared.

 

The Cherry Sisters were God Awful, but fun

The next night, some lunatic threw a wet sponge at them. Effie took off after him with an umbrella, chasing him into the street like a one-woman riot squad.

 

The sisters leaned into the chaos. They sold tickets warning that audiences could throw anything “except bricks.” Newspapers lined up to watch. “They sing,” one reviewer said, “as if they’ve never heard a song but believe they could reinvent the whole concept by yelling at it.” Another said, “People attend twice—once for curiosity, once to confirm the first time wasn’t a hallucination.”

 

By the end of the decade, they weren’t just performers—they were a traveling hallucination, a sideshow cyclone barreling through Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Omaha. The critics sharpened their knives. The crowds grew bigger.

 

The Chicago Inter Ocean dropped the mother of all reviews: “There is no adjective in the English language large enough to describe their performance. It was simply awful.”

 

The Cherry Sisters sued. 

 

They stormed into court claiming the newspaper had destroyed their “professional reputation.” The defense replied that such a thing had never existed. Effie said they were “persecuted angels of art” and insisted, “We have talent in abundance.” Reports say the judge nearly burst trying not to laugh.

 

The jury sided with the newspaper.

 

The case went up to the Iowa Supreme Court, who issued a ruling that can only be described as judicial comedy: “If it is within the realm of possibility to say that the Cherry Sisters entertain, it is within the realm of fair comment to say they do not.”

 

In other words: The First Amendment protects your right to say these women stink. It was a landmark legal precedent born from pure vaudeville chaos.

 

The sisters were flattened for about five minutes. Then they got right back on the road.

 

By now the show was full-blown madness—chicken wire stretched across the stage to stop the barrage of vegetables, moral lectures followed by patriotic anthems, followed by a skit so confusing one reviewer wrote, “I do not know what it was about, and I am certain they do not either.”

 

But beneath the carnival of ridicule was something strange and admirable. They believed in themselves with a purity that bordered on the psychedelic. Even their enemies admitted it.

 

“The Cherry Sisters are awful,” one paper said, “but awfully sincere.” Another said, “They are not entertainers. They are a force.”

 

Effie was the engine—unyielding, righteous, carved from marble and Iowa soil. Addie tried to keep the peace. Lizzie carried a voice described by critics as “a threat.” Jessie died young, leaving a haunting gap. Ella drifted in and out like a storm cloud full of electricity but no rain.

 

They never got rich. They never got good.

But they never gave up.

 

By the 1920s, Iowa spoke of them with fondness—local legends, folk heroes of theatrical disaster. Effie ran a confectionery in Marion and told anyone who listened that the critics were jealous. “They feared us,” she said. “We were original.”

 

And she wasn’t wrong.

 

When the last of them died, newspapers softened. The laughter turned nostalgic. They weren’t remembered as the worst performers of all time—they were remembered as the most fearless. Scholars today call them “the patron saints of glorious failure.” Vaudeville historians call them “the bravest performers who ever lived.”

 

In the final accounting, the Cherry Sisters didn’t conquer the stage. They conquered the American imagination. Terrible. Wonderful. Indestructible. Iowa-born.

 

And nobody who saw them could forget them.