SistaStrings

After a lifetime of fighting for a seat at the table, Monique and Chauntee Ross of SistaStrings have stuck together and forged a path to the heart of Americana music.

Words by David Peisner | Photos by David McClister

August 16, 2024

It’s a Friday afternoon in mid-April and Chauntee Ross is in the back corner of the stage at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta, holding her violin and bow in her left hand. Her right hand is cupped around the ear of her older sister, Monique, who is sitting beside her with a cello between her legs. Alongside them onstage, a rather subdued Brandy Clark and the rest of her band are soundchecking through the opening verse of Clark’s 2013 song, “Get High.” Chauntee and Monique, who perform under the name SistaStrings, have never played the song before but will play it with Clark and her band in front of a full house in a few hours. It’s the second date of SistaStrings’ spring tour opening for Clark, but the first night that the duo will join her onstage for part of her set. The only instructions they’ve been given regarding “Get High” came just seconds earlier when Clark’s bass player, Vanessa McGowan, told them succinctly, “Just do something with it.”

As Clark sings the first verse, Chauntee and Monique are in deep, feverish consultation with each other. Then Chauntee tucks her violin under her chin and begins to play a jaunty accompaniment. Monique starts plucking the strings of her cello before drawing her bow across the strings and adding some warm undertones. Chauntee looks at her sister and shrugs a little, as if to say, “Is this OK?” McGowan intuitively answers the unspoken question, shouting, “This is great!” When they hit a short instrumental breakdown at the song’s bridge, Clark — suddenly alight with energy — offers further instruction: “Make it cry!” As the whole ensemble swings into the final chorus, the song sounds bigger, bolder. When they finish, Clark turns back toward the Ross sisters and nods. “Wow. That sounded really good.”

A version of this scene has been playing itself out around SistaStrings over and over on stages and in studios for the last couple of years. In that time, the duo has become go-to collaborators for a murderer’s row of top-shelf artists. They’ve recorded and toured with Clark, Brandi Carlile, and Allison Russell, and played live alongside Jason Isbell, Margo Price, Maggie Rogers, and Ed Sheeran. They’ve performed on “Saturday Night Live" with Carlile, at the Grammys with Joni Mitchell, and at the Oscars with Andrea Bocelli. To give a sense of the duo’s trajectory consider this: Just three years after moving to Nashville in late 2020, SistaStrings accepted "Instrumentalist of the Year" from Ryman Auditorium's historic stage at the Americana Honors & Awards; the centerpiece of AMERICANAFEST, the association’s annual celebration of American roots music.

“It was a full circle moment,” Chauntee told me just before soundcheck, “some confirmation that we didn’t ruin our lives.” In fact, in a relatively short window of time, Monique and Chauntee Ross have established themselves as connective tissue in the intertwined Americana, folk, and country music scenes within Nashville and beyond. A number of factors help explain their rapid rise from nowhere — OK, Milwaukee — to becoming integral players in a tight-knit music community but a big one is the one Clark and her band just experienced onstage. 

“They can step into any situation and raise the bar musically,” Clark tells me over the phone a few weeks later. “I’ve seen them do it so many times. It blows my mind.”

Russell, who first met SistaStrings at a small venue in Wisconsin and then reconnected with them when they had all relocated to Nashville, echoed Clark’s assessment.

“They really elevate anything they’re a part of,” she says. “They don’t just slap what they do onto whatever they’re collaborating with. They listen deeply and connect emotionally to the artist they’re collaborating with. They’re extremely good improvisers, they’re very intuitive musically and very empathetic to the people they play with, so it makes it really easy to play with them.”

An hour or so before that soundcheck at the Variety Playhouse, I follow Monique and Chauntee Ross up a twisting, iron spiral staircase to a small, brick-walled dressing room. Monique, in a gray, sleeveless shirt and Adidas slides, sits down on a vinyl couch. Chauntee, whose electric pink braids tumble from the top of her head across her green shirt nearly all the way to her waist, sits at the other end of the couch. The pair have the sort of innate understanding of each other you can only get by growing up joined at the hip, but neither quite expected the turn their career has taken.

“We didn’t really have a plan,” says Monique. “I remember the first time we went out on Broadway in Nashville, we walked out of a parking garage, stood on the sidewalk, and there were people walking around with guitars. We were like, ‘How do we even start to break into the scene?’”

The women grew up as the two youngest of five siblings in a musically inclined family in Milwaukee. Their parents are pastors, and they were homeschooled through middle school. Only gospel and classical music was allowed in the house. Secular artists were strictly off-limits. “I remember hiding my first Destiny’s Child cassette tape,” Monique says. “Then, it was Usher’s Confessions.”

As Monique and then Chauntee turned five-years-old, each was gifted a violin from their parents and enrolled in classical music lessons.Their parents insisted they commit to their instrument until they were 18, but when she was eight, Monique fell in love with the sound of a tall redheaded boy playing the cello, and after two years of begging, her parents let her switch instruments.

“The cello just spoke to me,” she says. They each eventually picked up other instruments and played in various combinations with the rest of their family members.      

“We had a flute quartet and a string quartet,” says Chauntee. “Then there was the church band formation, where Dad would sing, I’d play drums and Monique played bass guitar.”

These weren’t just groups that banged around the family living room. They performed in churches, nursing homes, libraries, and the like. “There was also the cousins’ choir,” says Monique. “It was us and our cousins. We did a little mini-tour.”

Chauntee lets out a yelp. “There was another formation I’m now remembering! We never talk about this one! There was another homeschool family, the Kesslers, and they had all young kids like us, and they all played stringed instruments, and we played stringed instruments. They were white and we were Black. We were called Ebony and Ivory!”

The sisters took classes at the University of Wisonsin’s String Academy, but as talented, determined Black girls, they often found the classical music world stifling. The emphasis was rarely on creativity or personal expression, but rather on technical mastery. “Being an individual in classical music is just not very well-received,” says Monique. At times, the environment wasn’t just uninspiring, it was outright bigoted. “The year after I started playing cello, there was this girl who literally raised her hand in class and asked, ‘Do we have to play with the Black kids?’ I’m looking around, and I was the only Black kid in that class.”

Chauntee recalls being constantly underestimated. “I remember coming into practice then starting to play and people being like, ‘Wait, what? You can actually play?’” Both sisters continued studying classical music performance in college — Monique at the University of Wisconsin, Chauntee at the University of Michigan — but with similarly mixed results.

“A professor in college was like, ‘Oh, you’re actually pretty good at that for a Black girl’ to my face!” says Monique. “But honestly, it gave us fire to work harder, because it was just like, ‘I won’t let anybody say these things, and then also suck.’”

By the time both had graduated from college, their disillusionment with classical music was compounded by the lack of opportunities to actually make a living playing it. Both had moved back to Milwaukee, and there, they started to play together at clubs around town as SistaStrings. They quickly found that their classical music education had given them a technical proficiency that was uncommon in sweaty rock clubs, and the time they’d spent playing in churches honed a unique ability to improvise on the spot. Soon, they were collaborating with rock bands, singer-songwriters, R&B singers, and rappers from around the city. It took time though, to figure out how two sisters singing and playing cello and violin could stand as an act unto itself.

“We went through a long time where we were playing loud clubs on a bill with a whole bunch of dudes, so we were like, ‘We’ve got to have drums and bass. We can’t just have violin and cello,’” says Chauntee.

Monique nods. “We also didn’t know gear,” she says. “So, a lot of times, we were being drowned out by the band that we hired.”

During this time, they connected with Peter Mulvey, a folk singer who’d grown up in the same area of Northwest Milwaukee as the Ross family. “We hit it off, and I asked them if they’d want to sit in with me,” he says.

Mulvey soon became a mentor to Monique and Chauntee. They opened shows for him, accompanied him during his performances, and recorded both a live album and a studio album with him. “If you listen to the record I made before I made the records with them, and then listen to the records I made after, they just completely discombobulated my sound, which is what you need,” he says.

“They do a thing almost no one can do,” Mulvey continues. “The very best music is music that leaves room for the listener to come and be in that music. When you add things, there’s a danger of crowding the listener out. When Chauntee and Monique add notes to a piece of music, somehow there’s more room in it than before they added the notes.”

In 2019, SistaStrings released their own debut EP, a five-song effort called Lift, which melded their classical influences with strains of folk music, R&B, and gospel. But by the following year, Milwaukee’s music scene was starting to feel small and confining. As Monique puts it, “I feel like we’d reached a place in Milwaukee where it’s like, ‘What else can we do with our career here?’”

Their parents, whose families had originally migrated north from Tennessee and Mississippi a generation or two earlier, had recently reversed the migration pattern and relocated to Jackson, Tennessee. Wanting to be closer to their parents — but not too close — the sisters moved to Nashville in 2020. Just before they left, Mulvey sent emails to a bunch of artists he knew in the city to help soften their landing there.

One of those emails went to Russell. She quickly hired Monique to play cello with her at the Newport Folk Festival. Soon after, both Monique and Chauntee were performing with Russell regularly. These days, Monique and her daughter live next-door to Russell and her family in East Nashville.

“We share a yard, actually,” says Russell. “Our daughters have become chosen sisters as well. In fact, they have their own band that they started called Wild Forest Songs.”

SistaStrings’ connection with Russell opened up the Americana world to the duo. They met and began touring with Carlile, who became one of their biggest boosters, introducing them to Clark, Mitchell, and others. What has followed is not only a testament to the sisters’ musical virtuosity and infectious personalities, but also to the network of mutual support within the Americana community.

“I want everybody to experience SistaStrings,” says Clark. “I’ve told friends of mine that produce records, ‘The next time you need string players, call Chauntee and Monique.’ On tour, I’d tell people who were coming to the show, ‘Come early because you’ve got to experience SistaStrings.’”

As Russell puts it, “In the Americana community, and certainly our little rainbow coalition world of it, we really amplify, uplift, and support each other. It’s not about competition, it’s about community. The more that one thrives, the more that all can thrive.”

SistaStrings’ success is part of a bigger story too. After years of struggling to fit into the staid confines of classical music, the Ross sisters arrived in Nashville at a moment when the town was finally beginning to reckon with the legacy of systemic racism that has sidelined the stories of its Black innovators and ignored the diversity of its artist base. “The timing has been so incredible,” says Chauntee. “There’s a renaissance going on in Americana and country music especially. Having moved to Nashville during this time where everyone is like, ‘Let’s give credit to folks who have historically been erased from the roots of our music,’ now, finally, being Black women playing stringed instruments is actually helpful. We found a really interesting, welcoming space.”

At the Grammys, earlier this year, SistaStrings performed twice, once with Clark and Carlile on Clark’s song “Dear Insecurity,” which won a Grammy for Best Americana Performance, and once as part of the band playing alongside Joni Mitchell as she sang her classic, “Both Sides Now.” It was an epic night for the Ross sisters: Russell’s song, “Eve Was Black,” which the pair wrote the string arrangement for, also won a Grammy for Best American Roots Performance, and the two spent the time when they weren’t onstage, down on the floor of the Crypto.com Arena hobnobbing with the likes of John Legend, Lizzo, and Janelle Monáe. Russell recalls that after the awards show ended, Robert Glasper, the legendary jazz and R&B pianist, immediately dashed across the floor, through a roomful of stars that included Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Lana Del Rey, to introduce himself to Monique and Chauntee.

“He was like, ‘I want to collaborate with you!’” Russell says laughing. “I was like, ‘Get in line, Robert! Everybody wants to collaborate with them!’ I said to them after, ‘You’re going to be on Beyoncé’s next record.’ I don’t know if that will come true, but I sure hope it does.”

Amid all this love, SistaStrings’ main ambition right now is not to lose themselves in the profusion of opportunities to work on other people’s projects. “You can have a great time playing everybody else’s music all the time and working with so many incredible artists, and honestly, the checks be good,” says Chauntee, letting out a sharp laugh. “That first year [in Nashville], we were so busy doing everything for everybody all the time, but then we were like, “We haven’t written a single song.’”

When SistaStrings finish this tour with Clark, the duo has plans to write songs with her a few months later. They’ve also done writing sessions with a few others, including Russell’s husband and bandmate, JT Nero. Once they’ve got the material together, they’ll go into the studio with Carlile, who is set to produce their debut full-length, with an eye on releasing it sometime next year. Monique describes the songs they’ve been writing so far as “kind of all over the place but very much our voices.” They recognize that their own music can be frustratingly difficult for people to classify. In the end, they want the album to show off not just the broad range of what they can do — pop, folk, gospel hymnals, and one song that the women describe as “circus-y” — but the long and unlikely path they’ve traveled to get to where they are now.

“We’re so many different things,” Monique says. “We’re not just pastors’ kids.”

Chauntee throws her head back and laughs. “We just want to make good music — whatever that looks like,” she says. “I don’t care what genre it is.”  ◊

~ In Partnership with the Americana Music Association ~