Jug band
These homemade instruments are ordinary objects adapted to or modified for making sound, like the washtub bass, washboard, spoons, bones, stovepipe, jew's harp, and comb and tissue paper.
Beginning in the urban South (namely, Louisville, Kentucky, and Memphis, Tennessee), they played a mixture of blues, ragtime, and jazz.
As with brass instruments, changes in pitch are controlled by altering lip tension, and an accomplished jug player could have a two-octave range.
The swooping sounds of the jug fill a musical role halfway between the trombone and sousaphone or tuba in Dixieland bands, playing mid- and lower-range harmonies in rhythm.
Jug bands made street performances, played at parties, and began entertaining on riverboats on the Ohio River around 1900 and first appeared at the Kentucky Derby in 1903.
Jug bands from the Memphis area were more firmly rooted in country blues, hokum, and earlier African-American music traditions.
The 1930s depression and the devastating effect of radio on record sales reduced the output of jug band music to a trickle.
Gus Cannon's "Walk Right In" was a number 1 hit for the Rooftop Singers in 1963, the only time a jug band song topped the charts.
Also in 1963, Starday Records released The Original Talking Blues Man, by Robert Lunn with Jug & Washboard Band.
Maria D'Amato then joined the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, later marrying the guitarist Geoff Muldaur.
John Sebastian founded the pop music group the Lovin' Spoonful and later continued as a successful solo artist.
Mungo Jerry, which evolved from an earlier blues group, Good Earth, was in effect a jug band on their first live performances and recordings, thanks to their use of jug (played by the group's banjo player, Paul King, who left in 1972), and washboard, contributed by regular "extra member" Joe Rush.
Jesse Colin Young moved to the West Coast and formed the Youngbloods, whose first hit was "Grizzly Bear," a jug band standard.
Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan were in Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions before forming the Warlocks, which evolved into the Grateful Dead.
That instantaneous joy many have felt upon first listening to jug band music contributes to its fans' long-lasting affection and the genre's longevity.
A Canadian group, the Genuine Jug Band, from Vancouver, British Columbia, has most of its original members, who have played together since 1968.
The Crow Quill Night Owls from Washington play a mix of 1920s blues, jazz and hillbilly music, which they learned from the 78-rpm records they collect.
The film features numerous well-known musicians in interviews and performances, including John Sebastian, Jim Kweskin, Geoff Muldaur, David Grisman, Fritz Richmond, Maria Muldaur, and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, as well as Sankofa Strings, precursor band to The Carolina Chocolate Drops, and Taj Mahal as the voice of Gus Cannon.
[16] Kwait produced Sankofa Strings' second album, The Uptown Strut, which featured John Sebastian as guest artist.
Two years later, when he moved to Portland, Oregon, organizing the battle fell to Skip Landt, another Old Town School teacher.
Scenes of this nature have developed in New York City (centering on the Lower East Side and Red Hook, Brooklyn), Minneapolis, Chicago, Southern California (primarily the Los Angeles area), in the San Francisco Bay area, the Pacific Northwest, and Taipei, Taiwan.
The Muddy Basin Ramblers, based in Taiwan, have composed over forty contemporary jug band songs across five albums since 2002.
