There are high-achieving families, and then there are Cherryholmes, a home-grown bluegrass band that lit up the Napa Valley Opera House for an evening.

Ten years ago, the patriarch Jere Cherryholmes was a carpenter with the Los Angeles County school system, while matriarch Sandy home-taught her four children ranging in age from 6 to 15.

Today, they are touted as the “first family of bluegrass.”

They have put out three Grammy-nominated albums and they tour internationally from their new home, Nashville.

The two-hour concert at the Opera House Thursday featured bluegrass songs by themselves and others, with detours into heart-throb country, cool 1930s jazz and several Celtic numbers.

The band opened with torrid fiddling and strumming and hardly ever let up.

During one of the less frenetic moments, the family clogged like crazy.

The kids, who now mostly young adults, include Cia on banjo, B.J. on fiddle, Skip on guitar and Molly on fiddle, while Mom roamed with her mandolin and Dad, he of the rustic white beard, anchored the back of the stage with his upright bass.

The kids play the instruments assigned to them by their mother a decade ago. She sensed the family had enough talent to make musical waves, and they have.

The Opera House crowd was small, but passionate, incited by the sight of the Cherryholmes kids ripping through songs with musical dexterity and authentic bluegrass attitude.

Cia, the eldest, is the band’s strongest singer and a songwriter of distinction.

For the band’s encore, she sang her composition, “This Is My Son,” about a mother of religious bent who has given her son to fight in the military.

“You gave us yours/And I give them mine,” sang Cia, bringing shivers to many in the audience.

B.J. and Molly carried other songs with strong voices that seemingly welled up from the Appalachian heartland. These two fiddlers also synchronized their bowing on several numbers, becoming mirror images of each other.

While Sandy let her children occupy the foreground for most of the show, she was vocally stunning on several numbers, including the spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep.”

Jere did most of the talking, adopting a backwoods persona that boosted the band’s bluegrass bona fides. “Some people think they’re at the thea-tah,” he said, dismissively. “If something happens up here and you like it, squeal out like a cat,” he said.

And squeal the audience did.