Mrs. Henry was formed by vocalist and guitarist Daniel Cervantes in San Diego, CA in March of 2012, along with drummer Dustin Schemensky, bassist Jason Areford and guitarist Kyle Areford. Around the same time, Cervantes also created the record label Blind Owl, which Mrs. Henry is currently signed to. “The initial catalyst was to create a group of equals,” said Cervantes, in an interview in 2022. “I had a goal set to put together a band where everybody respected one another musically, creatively, artistically, and personally.” The members of Mrs. Henry also bonded over a shared appreciation for the songwriting of Bob Dylan and The Band, and and the group’s name refers to the track “Please, Mrs. Henry” that appears on the 1975 studio album The Basement Tapes.

Mrs. Henry is primarily influenced by the varying sub-genres of rock and roll from the 20th century, including psychedelic rock, punk rock, prog rock, metal, and blues. When asked to choose their three favorite albums on Apple Music, the band chose Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and Guns n Roses’ Use Your Illusion. Mrs. Henry is also heavily inspired by The Band, and fuses similar musical and artistic components into their music, including Americana, folk music, and country. A shift in style occurred in Mrs. Henry’s 2024 rock opera Keep on Rising, the band’s second concept album that was influenced partly by glam rock and musical theater.

In 2012, Mrs. Henry released their debut EP, Chicken Towne, which was followed by their second EP Not the Kinda Girl. Before Mrs. Henry released their third album, Otay, in 2016, members Dustin Schemensky, Jason Areford, and Kyle Areford left the band, and new members Blake Dean, Allan Ritter, and Nobuko Kemmotsu joined Cervantes as bass guitarist, keyboardist, and drummer, respectively. The group recorded Otay before Kemmotsu and Ritter left Mrs. Henry in 2014, and bassist Jody Bagley and drummer Chad Lee joined the band–the latter of whom met Cervantes when they both played in the band Creature In The Woods.

Cervantes joined the group Howlin Rain, a rock band created by Ethan Miller of Comets on Fire, in 2014. It was during his time in Howlin Rain when Cervantes met bassist Jeff McElroy, both of whom joined the Los Angeles indie alternative band Biirdie. During a recording session for Biirdie, Cervantes was introduced to the idea of playing The Band’s music. “I was at his house recording guitar, and he said something along the lines of, ‘Play it like Robbie Robertson.’ And I was completely unaware of the reference,” said Cervantes in an interview with Hollywood Soapbox. “We stopped immediately, pulled ‘Up On Cripple Creek’ up on YouTube, and I’ve been a fan ever since.”

Mrs. Henry’s 2016 studio album Otay was recorded in various settings, including garages, home studios, and warehouses. The album featured past members of Mrs. Henry as musical collaborators, and was a collection of recordings from 2011-2015. Otay was assembled by Cervantes in Otay, California, where the album derives its title. San Diego Citybeat praised the album as “a celebration of rock and roll throughout the ages that will never go out of style. In 2016, Mrs Henry also released their self-titled album MRS.HENRY, which was distributed as a two-volume set. According to the band’s label Blind Owl Records, the album is described as “a true birth of the group’s Nitro-burnin’ soul”. The content on MRS.HENRY was partially inspired by Mrs. Henry’s 2015 tour along the West Coast, and starts with the song “All I Can Do”, which is what Cervantes calls a “nine-plus minute psych-rock odyssey” consisting of “the actual ocean sounds recorded cliffside in the Pacific NorthWest”

On November 26, 2017, Mrs. Henry performed The Last Waltz; The Band’s farewell concert and subsequent documentary film that was originally performed and recorded in 1976. The short film also included interviews with the band members and a behind the scenes glimpse into how the concert came to be. Like The Band, who had invited special guests on stage, Mrs. Henry also features other musicians and bands in their own concert, which they perform in various cities across North America. Scarlet Rivera, who had toured with Bob Dylan during Rolling Thunder Revue and is credited as the violinist on Dylan’s 1976 studio album Desire, joined Mrs. Henry on stage for some of their performances, along with singer-songwriter Jack Tempchin and The Black Crowes guitarist Marc Ford. During the documentary, we learn about how The Last Waltz impacted each member, why Mrs. Henry found solace in performing the concert, and how they created community between the artists on stage and the fans of the music. 

Mrs. Henry released their double single “The River / It Will Be Alright”, which was recorded in San Francisco with Eric Bauer at Mansion Studio during the band’s first tour after The Last Waltz. “We had a few days off to fill in the tour schedule,” Cervantes remarked, “and I figured what better way to spend some time than recording with the band new material that had been written in one of our favorite cities in the world.” Cervantes had previously worked with Bauer during his time in Howlin Rain, and the song was partly inspired by hiking in Big Sur. “When you are on a hike, the sound of a river always gets you excited to go see it. Sometimes you meet people along the way that tell you whether or not it's worth going to. Sometimes you have to see it for yourself and sometimes it's absolutely worth it.”

In 2019, Mrs. Henry Presents The Last Waltz was released as a 3xLP set, featuring the recording of their show at The Belly Up in Solana Beach, CA. It was mastered by Joe Bozzi, who is known for his work with Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, both of whom were two of the special guests at the original 1976 concert. In 2020, Mrs. Henry also released a documentary of their performance on Youtube, which had previously premiered at the Oceanside Film Festival in August of 2019.

2020 saw the release of two of Mrs. Henry’s live albums, Live at The Casbah, which was performed and recorded at the legendary local venue in San Diego on the club’s 30th anniversary, and Live at the Pour House, captured at The Pour House in Oceanside, CA. Mrs. Henry also released their studio album Feel Free in the summer of 2020, which was noted as the group’s first conceptual project. Described by the band as being their own psychedelic exploration into Bob Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes recordings, it was recorded over the course of three days in the band’s warehouse bunker in Otay, CA. The album itself blended multiple genres, including hard rock, rhythm and blues, funk, and psychedelia, and featured renowned artwork collaborations with Lydia Roberts, Darryl Norsen, Fandy Darisman, Katbing, Roy G Biv, EyeGato, Strange Bouquets, Javier Arreguin Villegas, and Noah C Lekas. According to the band, the themes and content of the album offers one specific message: “I am you and you are me, where there’s a will there is a way to be free.”

In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic put restrictions on live concerts, Mrs. Henry created a multi-media web series called the “Medicine Show”, alluding to the medicine shows of the nineteenth-century. Mrs. Henry’s “Medicine Show” was released in two episodes on Youtube in June of 2020.
The show consisted of the band members portrayed by sock-puppets, and included performances from Mrs. Henry and other bands from their label

In April of 2022, Mrs. Henry collaborated again with Jack Tempchin for A Drunkard’s Dream Art & Music Festival, a concert that took place in the San Diego neighborhood of Barrio Logan. Tempchin, Mrs. Henry, and other San Diego-based artists performed new and old material, and the festival offered a place for other multi-media artists to showcase their work. Part of the proceeds for the festival were donated to Rollin from the Heart, an organization that aims to encourage disadvantaged youth to participate in positive lifestyles.

Mrs. Henry began touring under the name Chest Fever; a name that derives from one of the tracks on The Band’s 1968 album Music from Big Pink, in 2022. Chest Fever performs songs solely from The Band, and has been described as Mrs. Henry’s alter-ego. In an interview from 2024, Blake Dean stated that “ We like to say at every show: “We are a band playing the Band’s music.” Our band is Mrs. Henry, performing as Chest Fever. It’s like Bruce Wayne by day and Batman by night”.

Chest Fever’s first tour, Rock of Ages, began in July of 2022. The same year, the band introduced Canadian keyboardist Doug Organ, who played alongside Chest Fever until 2023, and reintroduced Mrs. Henry’s previous drummer Allan Ritter, who currently plays with Chest Fever as a touring member after drummer Chad Lee’s departure. Chest Fever’s first live album Rock of Ages was released in 2023, which included recorded songs from their corresponding tour the year before. During the same year, Chest Fever also began performing The Last Waltz consecutively in multiple cities across North America, where they were joined on stage with several prolific musicians, including English guitarist Albert Lee, violinist Scarlet Rivera, and Sylvia Tyson, the latter of whom was part of the Canadian folk duo Ian and Sylvia.

One of Chest Fever’s most notable performances of The Last Waltz took place at Massey Hall in Toronto in 2023. After the sold-out show, they donated a percentage of the money to the North York General Foundation to help fight men’s prostate cancer, the same disease that lead guitarist and vocalist of The Band Robbie Robertson died of in 2023. In a review of the concert, Presley Overgoor from Roots Music Canada wrote of the show: “They [Chest Fever] are the nicest band I’ve ever met, and are passionate about what they do. The love they have for The Band is uncompromised. To those who didn’t come to Chest Fever’s Last Waltz: you missed something truly special.”

The same year, Chest Fever also released their album Music from Big Pink, which consisted of reimagined covers of The Band’s songs from the 1968 album of the same name. The album was produced by David Kalmusky, the multi-platinum producer who has worked with several notable rock and pop artists. The tracks on Mrs. Henry’s Music from Big Pink consists of different sequences and arrangements of the original songs, and Mrs. Henry has emphasized their desire to convey their own sound while still remaining loyal to the quality of the original material. As of 2025, Chest Fever continues playing songs from The Band on stages across North America.

Mrs. Henry initially began working on the concept album Keep On Rising in 2021, during the Covid-19 lockdown. The album consists of three acts, and Mrs. Henry began performing songs from Act I: The Sex Sells, Love Drugs, Rock ‘N’ Roll Society in live shows, after pandemic restrictions were lifted. The band released the single “Everybody Wants Peace and Love” in early 2024 before releasing the album in full. According to the press release for Keep On Rising, the album tells the story of a “young rocker who is dying to be reborn a star. Cervantes describes the backdrop of the story as “an ultra-sexualized reality where drugs are available on every corner and rock and roll is a normalized way of life. There is no taboo, all is equal, nothing is sacred and everything we’ve ever known is subject to change with the wind.”

Reporters from Playboy Mexico praised the stage presence and chemistry of the band, and compared the performances and subject matter from Keep on Rising to the 2000 film Almost Famous; a movie about a traveling rock band in the 1970s [32]. When writing the lyrics and music for Keep On Rising, Mrs. Henry drew on influences from AC/DC, Alice Cooper, and Guns N’ Roses to Queen, Billy Joel, and Outkast. Inspired by rock operas of the past, Mrs. Henry also took inspiration from The Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ, Superstar, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

In an interview with San Diego Reader in 2021, Cervantes states that “at the very end of Act 2, you have the turn of the tide, and the whole game changes. Sometimes, you have a moment that hits you, and you decide for a change in a positive way [...] Act 3 represents that as a turn. Then, it’s nothing but a rise up. It’s all positive. It’s the most positive music I think we’ve ever made.” Keep On Rising received favorable reviews from critics, and was described by Louder Sound as an album that succeeds in “never letting up in its ultimate goal: to create the definitive modern rock 'n' roll story through a universal experience we can all empathize with.”