Cherry Poppin' Daddies - Reception and Influence

Reception and Influence

In their native Oregon, the Daddies have been called "a Northwest institution", having been inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame in 2009. The Register-Guard has credited the band with shaping Eugene's musical culture in the 1990s, dubbing the scene "the house that the Daddies built", while Eugene Weekly added likewise, "when some people think of the Northwest music scene, they think of grunge. If you’re a Eugenean, however, you might think of swing, thanks to Cherry Poppin' Daddies". Seattle's The Rocket commented on the band's influence in 1997, stating "he Daddies were busting out the swing before the Squirrel Nut Zippers, stirring cocktails before Combustible Edison and skating the ska before Sublime...the band shakes out an incredible variety of sounds with peerless verve and polish."

Elsewhere in their home state, the band has also drawn a fair amount of criticism. The Portland Mercury have been frequent detractors of the Daddies, deriding them as "at best, an edgeless recycle of a rather particular musical fashion movement; at worst, a self-conscious parody of the genre they purport to love", while the Willamette Week once dismissed them as "an annoying white-boy funk rock band who, seeing the opportunity, milked the swing revival for all it was worth".

The Daddies are more widely recognized, however, as one of the first bands to revive swing music in the musical mainstream, helping spearhead the swing revival of the late 1990s which paved the way for the larger successes of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and the Brian Setzer Orchestra. Although the Daddies have been cited as an influence on ska punk band the Mad Caddies, SF Weekly claims the group has "never gotten the accolades it deserves" for their eclectic funk-ska repertoire. The Phoenix New Times expressed similar sentiments, listing the "woefully unsung" Daddies as among the bands that defined the Northwest's "alternative to alternative", " rock with more complexity than three-chord guitar riffs and social critique without heavy-handed cynicism". In a 2008 editorial blog, a Rolling Stone editor, reviewing the band's punk history, declared the Daddies "one of the most misunderstood bands of the nineties".