The Beat of a Different Drum

Sherry Gingras sells drums, and she says that with a tinge of disbelief. 

“I never expected it,” she told me. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m going to open a drum shop and become a drum teacher.’”

It was more like, “This is so amazing.” 

So amazing that once she became familiar with the doumbek, the djembe, the brekete and djun dun, she was hooked. And so, since 2002, she’s owned and operated Drumz, located at 3700 ½ Kerbey Lane. It’s a 900-square foot cottage that she first leased in 1978 and then bought in 1952. 

It’s tucked behind Wendy Wells Jewelry & Gifts and under a canopy of hackberry trees and two huge palm trees she planted herself, and all sorts of other plants and vines, next door to Kerbey Lane Café.

Recently renovated, Drumz is a warm and friendly place full of African percussion instruments and ceremonial tribal masks and wall art and baskets full of rain sticks and walking sticks, flutes, gongs and other instruments that shake or rattle. Sherry said it’s fun to watch people walk in, hesitantly, almost embarrassed at first.

“They come in the door thinking, ‘I’m not sure why I’m here,’ or ‘I’ve always wanted to try this,’” she said. “And they do, and then, they blossom.”

Few of these people, she adds, are actual musicians. Many don’t even think of themselves as musical because they’ve been told, in one way or the other, that they’re not and never will be because they don’t possess the talent, the skills, the voice, the rhythm, the whatever to be a musician, and they believed it and gave up.

And it’s a lie.

Music is for everyone because it’s essential. It’s part of our DNA, and that’s Sherry’s message. That’s why Drumz exists.

•••

Of course, it took Sherry a long time to realize this herself, and my first question to her was, “How did you get here from there?”

“Oh, wow,” she said. “That’s an interesting question.”

Curled up on a long sofa the color of lemon curd with Sid, her 2-year-old Golden Doodle, Sherry tries to make sense of the journey that has taken her from Austin as an infant and toddler, to Houston as a child, to California as a girl, to New York and Tennessee as a teenager, and eventually back to Austin as a UT coed and adult.

Her father was medical student in Galveston until his father died, so he was forced to drop out and take a job with Pfizer to support his growing family. He found sales to be empty and hollow, especially in light of what was going on in the country at the time in terms of social justice, so he entered theology school in Berkeley, California to become a Unitarian minister. 

It was the early 1960s—closer to the end of the Beatniks than it was the arrival of the Beatles, and the Bay Area in general was avant-garde in a bongos and beret kind of way, as opposed to Houston, which, like the rest of the South then, was hot and humid and narrow. Lines were drawn, and people crossed them at their own peril.

“We moved from a typical neighborhood in Houston, which was all-white, into a neighborhood in Berkeley, where we were in the minority,” Sherry said. “We had to learn to navigate the terrain, but, as I remember it now, it wasn’t hard.”

She was young and open-minded and it didn’t matter that her new friends came in various shades of black and brown and pink. She loved Berkeley and was sad to leave after her father finished theology school and took a job in Newburgh, New York, which is located 60 miles north of New York City on the western side of the Hudson River, not too far from West Point. Then, a town of approximately 30,000, Newburgh had enjoyed its heyday during World War II but was stagnant and roiling with racial tensions. 

Though her school seemed like something out of West Side Story, Sherry said she liked it. She fit in nicely and made friends with kids from all corners: Italians, Puerto Ricans, blacks, inner-city whites. It wasn’t Berkeley, but it was fine, and she protested vigorously her father’s decision to relocate the family to Chattanooga, Tennessee.

•••

Sherry’s father became a Unitarian minister because he believed in social justice, and not in an abstract way. He felt compelled to join the struggle for racial equality, and the struggle in 1962 was being fought south of the Mason-Dixon Line, so he had to go.

For Sherry, who was about to enter junior high, the move was traumatic. Houston to Berkeley was great. Berkeley to New York was OK. New York to Chattanooga was awful. 

“We landed smack dab in the middle of the Civil Rights movement,” Sherry said. The tension was palpable, and the danger was real and lethal, as they would soon learn.

Her dad marched in Selma, and his close friend, James Reeb, also a Unitarian minister, was murdered there, just a few days after the infamous “Bloody Sunday” confrontation of March 7, 1965.

Reeb had planned to return by car to Chattanooga with Sherry’s dad. 

“He literally had his suitcase in the trunk and was ready to go, but he decided to stay in Selma, and he was murdered the next day,” Sherry said. “It was big news because there hadn’t been a murder of a white minister up until then.”

Back in Chattanooga, her father’s church was also set afire twice.

“The second time, my parents got the call in the middle of the night,” she said. “They woke us up to tell us what had happened and that they had to go. They told us to stay put, but after they left, my brothers and I decided to go anyway because we were worried about them. I remember walking in our pajamas to the church, and my parents got so upset at us for doing that and yet, they understood why we did it.”

Meanwhile, Sherry was forced to balance her father’s zeal against the day-to-day reality of just being another American teenager. She understood the difference between right and wrong, but she also wanted to be a part of an “in-crowd,” even if that crowd included classmates whose beliefs and actions were occasionally despicable. 

She avoided ugly confrontations and tried to fit in. Tall, blonde, pretty and sensible, she wrote for the student newspaper and joined a couple of social clubs. All things being equal, she enjoyed high school.

Shortly after her graduation, her parents and two younger brothers returned to California, while she entered the University of Tennessee. She ping-ponged back and forth from Knoxville to Claremont, where her brothers were caked in flower power and behaving like hippies-in-training, and then she transferred to the real UT — the one in Austin — where she majored in psychology and supplemented her income by making fabric art and selling it on the Drag.

“I’d go back and forth to Southern California, and there was a great art scene there,” Sherry said. “My mom opened a plant store, and I thought, ‘Oh! She opened a store. That’s interesting.’”

In other words, “That’s doable. I can do that.” 

That was the beginning of her next few decades as an entrepreneur and businesswoman. 

Learning from U.S. Navy sailors she had met at Balboa Park in San Diego, Sherry created elaborate macramé and pieces of art constructed from coral, seashells and mineral specimens. She opened a studio on Kerbey Lane and called it “Earthsea.” After she sold it, she opened and/or operated businesses that hawked everything from Southwestern furniture to suede jackets to cowboy skirts.

She also married, had two daughters, divorced and remarried to her current husband of 25 years, Tom Gingras, an Austin musician and sculptor. One day, she and Tom were shopping for guitars at Strait Music back when it was located at Lamar and 10^thStreet, and they noticed a collection of African drums — djembes, to be specific.

“They were very colorful, and I’d never seen anything like them, so I started banging around on them,” Sherry said. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I thought, ‘These are so amazing.’”

On the way home, they couldn’t stop talking about the drums, about how cool they were and how they should have bought one.

“As soon as I had a moment, I called a salesman I knew there and told him to put this one specific drum aside because I was going to come back Saturday and buy it for Tom.”

On Friday, Tom returned to the store to inquire about the same drum and was told, “Sorry. Too late. It’s been put on hold.” 

They didn’t tell him by whom. So, Sherry bought it on Saturday, brought it home, presented it to Tom and then took full possession of it.

“I was just mesmerized by it,” she said. “Eventually, he bought me another drum, and while he enjoyed thumping around, I wanted to learn about the music, the specific African rhythms and harmonies.”

And that was the genesis of Drumz.

Sherry took whatever lessons she could find in Austin and then traveled to LA and New York and studied the work of Babatunde Olatunji, the Nigerian drummer, bandleader and teacher who introduced to American audiences the intricacies of African music and culture.

“Babatunde believed this kind of music and rhythm could bring harmony and peace to the world because it builds community,” she said. “In Africa, it’s performed as an ensemble. It’s not just, ‘One person plays this, and then another person plays that.’ Instead, it’s multiple rhythms going on at once. Everyone contributes in one form or another, so it solidifies the feeling of community among people who can otherwise be very different.”

That’s no longer the case, she said.

“Music has changed from being a participatory experience to being a commodity. That is, it’s something to own instead of something to do. We have separated the audience from the performers, and there’s a big chasm between them, and so people watch music but are not part of it.”

That’s not only unfortunate, she said. It’s unnatural, so her mission today is to entice people to join the band, to sing along, to dance, to build community through rhythm and music. She teaches this. She performs herself as often as possible, at gigs and benefits and fund-raisers, often with a group of women who go by the name, “The Djembabes.”

 She’s starting to teach it to her grandchildren. She has five with one on the way.

“I’m trying to get one of them to start drumming with me,” she said. Until then, she and Sid, the Golden Doodle, will keep shop at 3700½ Kerbey Lane.

“I opened Drumz 17 years ago, and that’s a pretty long cycle for me, but it’s been awesome. It’s kept me in this place and in this job longer than anything else I’ve ever done.  I’m met the most amazing people and watched many of them open up. It’s rewarding to appreciate how good it feels for people to come in here and learn to make music, to learn they can make music.” 

She believes people need this to help them attain and/or maintain their sense of equilibrium. 

“They—especially people who have been intimidated or thwarted or left out—need to express their rhythmic senses,” Sherry said. “They need to connect to the environment and to the rhythms that govern our natural cycles.”

In other words, they need, if just for the sake of their own sanity, to bop a djembe, bang a balaphone or rattle a tabla every now and then.