In The Beginning …And The End Was The Jug-With The Memphis Jug Band In Mind

By Lester Lannon

“Remember back in the early 1960s when folk music of all kinds was getting a serious workout not from the folk, they were kind of abandoning that old-time music, the Saturday night barn dance, the mist of times hills and hollows, the big muddy Delta silts, for other more modern ways, but city kids like us, college students who were looking for something new, or maybe better something old, and would gravitate toward anything that smacked of that, ’’chuckled Zack James, a.k.a. Washboard Slim back in the day as he told his gathered audience of Frankie Riley, Jack Callahan, Sam Lowell, Bart Webber, and Julie Lisa, a. k. a as the Riverdale Jug Band back in that same day sitting in at the bar at the Club Nana of blessed memory as they cut up the torches of their youthful musical days.

The whole idea of cut up torches, or rather what would become that cutting, had gathered steam a few months before when the crew and their wives and girlfriends, or in the case of Julie, her husband, had gone to the 50^th anniversary reunion of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band at the Clun Passim in Harvard Square. That night the remaining trio, Jim Kweskin, Geoff Muldaur, Maria Muldaur, and an assortment of side musicians who had worked with the trio on various subsequent occasions put on show to show that they might be fifty years older but their ability to made that jug which they created at the beginning still had “it,” that that “it” required no further explanation. Name it, Washington At Valley Forge, Cassie Moan, The Killing Floors, Rent Man Blues, Rag Mama, Blues In The Bottle, the whole shebang, ending up with the classic Just Like You Used To Be had the small full house in rapture the whole evening.

After that show, the early show of two that the Jug Band was putting on for three straight nights at the Club, the ex-Riverdale Jug Band members headed to the Café Blue to discuss their various takes on that performance that night. While the waitress, oops, waitperson as Julie corrected everybody, took their orders for expresso lite and brownies, also lite if that is possible for a brownie, a throw-back to the old days when such an order was mandatory if you wanted to hold your seat in the clubs where there was no cover charge all agreed that for whatever reason, the Kweskin Jug Band still could arouse a crowd just like they had when Sam and Frankie had first seen the band in its infancy at the old Club 47 on Mount Auburn Street. Part of their energy and spirited voices reflected in a comment by Frankie that Jim and Geoff’s taking many years off from performing before coming back on tour probably was a very wise move that saved their voices unlike the never-ending tour of Bob Dylan which had destroyed whatever voice he might have had left. After sipping their expressos lite and devouring their brownies (nobody could believe that back in the day there were nights when that brownie was “supper”) they all went their separate ways.       

That night though set something going in all their hearts, something like unfinished business, something not completed. As if by some blown wind they in their respective closed thoughts thought about how after some initial local success, playing regularly at the Club Blue and Café Nana a sign of success in those days when those clubs were just a notch below the Club 47 as the place for up-and-coming talent. Places to work out their kinks, test their material on knowledgeable audiences and gain some credence by being in the thick of one of the three or four major folk centers in the country along with the Village, Old Town in Chi town and North Beach in Frisco town. Then the bottom sort of dropped out, there was not enough room in the rarified airs of jug music for several groups to succeed once rock and roll, the British invasion, and acid-etched rock came to the fore. As usual people began to make other plans, go back to whatever they had originally planned to do before the jug bug got to them. Julie, the lead vocalist (and incredible tambourine player), had been the first to go after deciding to get married (not to that husband with her that Club Passim concert night that was her second husband). Then Sam and Bart decided to head west not so much in pursuit of any musical ambitious but to join their generation in search of whatever it was that they were in search of. Frankie tried to pick up with other musician but the sound never was the same with the younger players who had not been washed by, hell, who actually had not even heard of the Memphis Jug Band, The Cannon Stompers, or the Mississippi Sheiks, and after trying a failed solo career went to work in his father’s carpet business (which he now ran getting and was getting ready to pass on to his son).     

What stuck in their collective craws after the Kweskin concert would not let go. Frankie would remember when they had played the Newport Folk Festival and were seen as an up and coming group. Jack remembered the night they fronted for Judy Collins at the Suffolk Downs race track with all the planes from Logan flying overhead. Julie remembered the night Maria Muldaur came backstage and showed her a couple of exercises to do so she could yodel on a Jimmy Rodgers song. Sam remembered a few night when he would leave some club and a couple of female aficionados would be waiting to talk to Mr. Lowell. Bart remembered how proud he was the night his girlfriend, Betsy Binstock, later to be and still his wife, came to see him play at Jordan Hall the night they fronted for Josh White, Junior. Zack James remembered the night Joan Baez saw him play that washboard and started calling him Washboard Slim (and a couple of other things when they were alone at her place a few nights later). With those memories it was only natural that all would think the obvious thought now that they had run through careers, child-rearing, marriages, affairs, and assorted amateur nights of performing for family, friends and congregations. Nobody balked at Zack’s idea, nobody said you can’t go home again, nobody said that was then and this is now.

So not many nights after the night we speak of after Julie had gone to Zambo’s Music Store in the Square and bought a nice second-hand tambourine and made arrangements to take voice lessons again with Annabelle Worth, after Jack dusted off the old jug that was serving now as ornament in his den office, after Frankie tuned up his guitar, after Zack went rummaging for a decent washboard, after Bart rented a bass, and after Sam got a new bow for his fiddle the old Riverdale Jug Band could be found in Bart’s Garage in that town preparing to do their first rendition of Cassie Moan in almost fifty years getting ready for when they would play at the Evergreen bar for three night come April.  In the beginning was the jug. In the end too.