Born in Nashville with familial roots in rural Tennessee, the Moore family relocated to Minnesota when Rose was only a few weeks old. After a young adulthood spent bouncing between New Orleans, San Francisco and everywhere in between, she returned home to Minneapolis where she married and started a family of her own. It was in that life stage that the music of Cherokee Rose was fostered in its most elemental stages. Short phrases of poetry, single stand-alone stanzas penned over the course of a decade, were informally put to music as Rose strummed the guitar her father had bought for her when she was nine years old. Though Rose insists, “They weren’t yet songs.” It wasn’t until she put the lyrics that would become “Sweet Fire” to music, that she thought of herself to have actually become a songwriter. Performing under the name Cherokee Rose in the 1980s and ‘90s, Rose’s debut release - Buckskin - existed in a sort of suspended-animation: issued as a small run cassette-only demo tape and sold at shows direct to a smattering of fans in 1993. No record label, no distribution. Where Buckskin acted as her first demo tape, by the time she went to record To All The Wild Horses a few years later, Rose was fully immersed in a music career. With some support and plays from reservation radio, and consistent touring of coffee shops, art spaces, native cultural events and niche music festivals.