An instrumental ensemble developed among black Americans in the 1920s and 30s as a popular novelty entertainment for medicine shows and rural picnics. It takes its name from the use of a jug as a bass instrument, the player making buzzing sounds with the lips and the jug acting as a resonator. Generally only one jug is used in each band, which otherwise comprises strings and a melody instrument such as harmonica or kazoo; but one of the earliest such groups, Whistler’s Jug Band from Louisville, sometimes used as many as three jugs. The Dixieland Jug Blowers (also from Louisville) occasionally employed two jugs and as many as three wind instruments. The jug is associated mainly with folk-blues groups; Will Shade’s Memphis Jug Band and Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers, both based in Memphis, were pre-eminent among early jug bands. The former’s K.C. Moan and the latter’s Going to Germany (both 1929, Vic.), minor masterpieces of the genre, feature an interplay of harmonica or kazoo against strings and jug. The style of Jack Kelly’s South Memphis Jug Band was more primitive, as is demonstrated by Highway no.61 Blues (1933, Mlt.). In rural districts the jug continued to be used as a folk instrument, though it lost its popularity on recordings late in the 1930s. During the folk revival of the 1960s jug bands were briefly reintroduced by white performers in the blues idiom.
B. Bogert: ‘Clifford Hayes and the Louisville Jug Bands’, vols 1–4, RST Records, JPCD 1501-2–1504-2
S.B. Charters: ‘The Memphis Jug Bands’, The Country Blues (New York, 1959), 75–89
B. Olsson: Memphis Blues and Jug Bands (London, 1970)
PAUL OLIVER