From The “Burg, Lynchburg VA By: Darrell Laurant | The News & Advance Published: April 23, 2012 Sometimes, leftovers can be as tasty as the original dishes. Take the musical group Jenny Reynolds & Cherry Hill, for example. Lead singer Reynolds began stretching out her voice in church choirs. Guitarist Tommy Cox grew up wanting to emulate Eddie Van Halen. Tim Echols plays a mean bluegrass mandolin, bass player Eric Hollandsworth has his roots in jazz, and guitarist Will Newman was formerly John Lennon in a Beatles tribute band. And then there's violinist Daniel Kepel Young, a classical musician with virtually no rock and roll experience. "Basically, we're the leftovers from a couple of other bands," Reynolds said recently. Mix well, microwave, and you've got a new group that is attracting considerable attention in Central Virginia. Not that some local music fans aren't a little surprised when they come to a Jenny Reynolds & Cherry Hill performance. Cox has played in seemingly dozens of Lynchburg-area rock and R&B bands and is generally regarded as one of the best lead guitarists between Charlottesville and Danville. Reynolds has a high energy style and a voice that roams between bluesy, country and hard-edged rock. So you would expect, well, a rock band. But when Jenny Reynolds & Cherry Hill played the Ellington last month, they walked out on stage and lined up holding acoustics instruments. No chords, no plug-ins, no percussion except for Hollandsworth’s bass. “We lost a drummer and added a fiddle player,” Reynolds said. And on its website, the band has this answer to the “genres” question: “Rock, acoustic, bluegrass-ish.” Which sounds a little like another bluegrass group that crossed over with quite a bit of success – the Grateful Dead. But Cherry Hill is not a jam band. Its Ellington set list included everything from country to bluegrass to Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” to “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” by Wild Cherry (no relation). “We can pretty much play anything,” Reynolds said. Including, Cox noted, an increasing amount of band-written material. “I’ve always enjoyed writing songs,” he said. “Maybe part of it comes from being a big fan of the Beatles.” In fact, while performing in the same tribute band (“Hard Day’s Night”) as current bandmate Newman, Cox impersonated Paul McCartney. That meant learning how to play a bass guitar lefthanded. “You have to just sort of slip your own material in around the songs that people know,” Cox said. “We’ve gotten pretty good at that.” Recalled Reynolds: “A few weeks ago, we were playing the Stoney Badger and people were actually dancing to our originals. That was really good to see.” According to Cox, the band’s wide variety of musical influences is a bonus when it comes to creating music. “That way, we can all learn from each other,” he said. All of the members have “day jobs” – although in the case of Cox and Hollandsworth that involves teaching music – and Reynolds, a branch manager for the Bank of the James, thinks that might contribute to the band’s spark. “This is what we do for fun,” she said. “We’re out there enjoying ourselves, and I guess that’s catching.”