Warren Holmes (1921 - 2005)

Warren Holmes - 1955

Biography

Warren Holmes, from Randolph County, Alabama began singing Gospel music at a young age. He attended the Vaughn School of Music in Tennessee. Next, he went to Dallas Texas to attend the Stamps-Baxter Music School. While there, he met Bob Jones, who asked him to sing bass full time with him in Fresno California with the Stamps Harmony Boys. While Warren was in Fresno, James Blackwood called and asked him to come to Shenandoah, Iowa and join the Blackwood Gospel Quartet. His time with the Blackwood Gospel Quartet lasted from 1948 until the group was discontinued in 1950.

Holmes soon joined Bobby Strickland’s Crusaders Quartet in Birmingham, Alabama as the quartet’s original bass singer. Following stints with the McDonald Brothers Quartet in Clinton, Illinois, Gene Lowery’s Southland Quartet in Olney, Illinois, and the Tulsa Trumpeteers, Holmes joined the Foggy River Boys with Bill and Monty Matthews in Springfield, Missouri in late 1954. They were on the Ozark Jubilee with Red Foley on network radio and during its first season on national TV on ABC. They were also a part of Foley’s touring Ozark Jubilee show and sang for the Oral Roberts Ministries.

Holmes left the Foggy River Boys around the beginning of 1956 and joined C. R. Melton’s All American Quartet in Quincy, Illinois. In 1958 he sang briefly with David Reece’s reorganized Rangers Quartet in Akron, Ohio until the group transitioned into a trio. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Holmes sang with the Monitors Quartet in Indianapolis, Indiana. Later he managed and sang bass for his own Continental Quartet in Anniston, Alabama for approximately twenty years.