Jug band veteran

Last Wednesday, I went to my favorite neighborhood music club to hear Jim Kweskin, renowned to '60s folk music enthusiasts for his great jug band. (That group--which featured Maria & Geoff Muldaur along with the late Fritz Richmond, maestro of the jug and washtub bass--disbanded in 1968.) Looking dapper in a khaki blazer and scally cap that put a Beatnik accent on his greyed moustache and aquiline nose, Kweskin sang and played guitar in a trio that also included Matt Leavenworth on the fiddle and Matthew Berlin on the bass. They played an assortment of ragtime songs, swing tunes, and country blues in a straightforward style, encouraging the audience to sing along.

The performance had a very relaxed air--there was nothing outré in the arrangements of these tunes or in the soloing. But if this music sounded more conventional than fans of the Kweskin Jug Band might have expected, it was nonetheless warm and alive and deeply inhabited. Kweskin projected the easy confidence of an itinerant who had come home again with these songs--many of the very songs that had originally fed his crazy-quilt vision of American music. If one of them stood out as the emblem of the evening, it was probably the trio's cover of Mississippi John Hurt's "My Creole Belle," a wistful tune buoyed by a gentle ragtime rhythm that Kweskin picked out on his guitar as though his fingers moved to it naturally--hearing it was like putting your hand on the pulse that had been animating the entire set.

Hurt was a hill country farmer who recorded a handful of songs in 1928 and kept on with his quiet life--until '60s folklorists rediscovered him and made him into a star alongside the other surviving country blues singers. Though not a stranger to the blues, he wasn't strictly a bluesman; he was a "songster" who sang and played from a grab bag of styles. Ragtime songs, along with the minstrel songs and cakewalk tunes from which ragtime had developed, were in that bag. His style of fingerpicking--like a pinwheel spinning in the summer breeze--was molded out of their syncopated melodies and rotating harmonies.

The jug bands from the early decades of the 20th century, several of which made recordings in the '20s, were also grab bag affairs.

(To be continued...just wanted to get something new up here since I haven't blogged in so long!)