In the early 20th century, the Cherry Sisters — a family of performers from Marion, Iowa — were like a meme.
Simply invoking the name — the Cherry Sisters — was shorthand for anything awful. As Anthony Slide wrote in the Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, the onstage siblings became "synonymous with any act devoid of talent."
Apparently, they were a cross between early American performance art and age old scapegoatism.
